Why Write A CV? Here’s 5 Career Boosting Reasons

A curriculum vitae or C.V. is a short document, which summarises who you are and what you’ve achieved. Your professional experience, academic achievements, and more are all on display in a CV for recruiters to see and evaluate.

Still, even though everyone understands that a C.V. is crucial to the job-hunting process, very few people take the time to understand its benefits.

Chiefly why you want to write a CV can be distilled down to 5 main reasons:

Increases your self-confidence in your job hunt
Reduces the amount of follow up work you’ll have to do
Gets you in the right mindset
Increases motivation for both you and recruiters
Helps you stand out from among other candidates

Writing a CV increases self-confidence

How often do you take the time to genuinely read your own C.V. word for word? Be honest!

Most of the time, when you’re checking for mistakes like typos or inaccuracies you’re more concerned about whether or not that C.V. will impress other people, namely the recruiters that you’ll send that document to read.

When you’ve drafted up your C.V., the first person it should impress is you!

Remember: that document summarises everything you’ve achieved in your academic and professional lives. All your hard work, all the challenges that you managed to overcome; all of it is on display in your C.V.

When you take the time to read every line of that document, you’ll start to remember all of the great things that you’ve done in your past.

When we’re on the job hunt, we often think about what’s ahead of us. That’s normal. But we should also look back at our past and remember how much we’ve grown, learned, and overcome. Your C.V. will remind you of all those things, and you’ll feel more confident about yourself as a result.

That confidence will show when you attend an interview, which will impress your recruiter even more!

Writing a CV reduces workload

Job hunting is almost like a full-time job in itself! With so many listings to search, applications to complete and calls to place, you’ll need all the help you can get to manage all of the leads. And that’s where your C.V. comes in.

If you prepare it correctly, your C.V. will reduce a lot of the legwork that you’ll need to do to secure a paid position.

You see, preparing your C.V. is like training someone to advocate on your behalf. With so many people on the job market, recruiters have very little time to evaluate and consider you as a candidate. So, your C.V. will do a bulk of the work for you.

As you send copies of your C.V. out to tens (or more) recruiters, those documents will tell the hiring team everything they need to know about you. If your C.V. manages to capture their attention and pique their interest, its more likely those recruiters will remember your name.

Remember: you can’t be everywhere all of the time. Let your C.V. do some of the heavy lifting.

Writing a CV creates the right mindset

Throughout the job hunting process, you’ll raise your hopes and face lots of disappointments, unfortunately that’s just the way of things. You might think that getting that rejection email from a job is the worst outcome, but it’s not.

Quite often, recruiters won’t even let you know that you’ve missed the cut, leaving you in limbo trying to figure out where you could improve.

So, how do you cope with the emotional challenges of the job hunt? You do it by creating the right mindset and your C.V. is the perfect tool to help you do that!

If your job hunt begins to go on for longer than desirable consider drafting specialised versions of your C.V. that is tailored to the different jobs or roles that you find most appealing.

This not only makes you present as a specialist amongst the crowd of other applicants but you’ll also start to appreciate the importance of being ultra diligent about what you include content wise.

By creating specialist C.V. even in the face of rejection, you’ll be able to keep your chin up by knowing you’ve taken steps to improve your approach.

Writing a CV increases motivation

Still, using your C.V. on your job hunt isn’t all about hard work and diligence. It’s also about keeping yourself motivated!

By maintaining your excitement, you’ll continue through the ups and downs of the job hunt without ever giving up. But how does the C.V. help with that?

Firstly, you’ll get excited every time you draft and edit your C.V. because each version offers you new hope! With every improvement that you put into your C.V., you’ll increase your odds of landing your dream job, even if only by a tiny percentage at a time. Plus, nothing could be more motivating to a job hunter than getting that phone call or email inviting you onto the next stage of an interview!

The important thing here is that your C.V. doesn’t just help you get excited; it also does the same for the recruiter! Remember: your recruiter is a human being (well, hopefully!), and they too have a job to do.

There role is to find the perfect candidate and if your C.V. tells them they’re about to meet that person…. they’ll be as hyped as you are to get that interview process started!

A C.V. helps you stand out

Last but not least, your C.V. also helps you to stand out. No matter what time of the year it is, the job market is always full of people who are willing to apply for almost any open position available. That makes things challenging for both you and the recruiter.

Put yourself in the shoes of your recruiter for just one minute. At most, recruiters might only have a few seconds to go through your C.V. and decide whether or not you are a suitable candidate.

Their inboxes and desks are full of similar documents from many other candidates. To stand out, your C.V. needs to capture their attention and pique their interest quickly. That way, they’ll spend more time on your C.V. (even seconds count in the world of job-hunting).

Keep the design and content of your C.V. simple, concise, and straight to the point. Highlight your best qualities and achievements, especially the ones that are relevant to the job that you want.

We’ve distilled how to do this with simple to follow instructions here.