Insights

For people who want to change roles or industries, or who have less conventional career paths, then a skills-based CV can have greater impact than the traditional CV.

One of the first dilemmas people have when writing CVs is whether it should be a one page summary or spread over several pages.  I recommend having both.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t exist.

There is no such thing as The Perfect CV.   If you talk to 100 different people, you will get 100 different opinions.  But here are my own recommendations on how you can improve the impact of your CV.

The interview continues to be the most common selection device and tends to have a  disproportionate amount of influence on hiring decisions. And yet numerous studies have shown that it is a very poor predictor of job performance.

Very often the candidate who is most skilled in interview techniques is the person hired, even though they may not be the best-fit candidate for the position.  Conversely, the applicant who performs  poorly in the job interview is likely to be eliminated from the process regardless of experience, fit, or even references.  Research highlights five common traps for Interviewers to avoid…

When Donald Trump recently contracted COVID-19, Warren Harding was briefly in the news as one of the four US Presidents who died of natural causes while in office.  Despite a landslide victory when elected, and his huge popularity at the time, he was largely forgotten in the mainstream consciousness until he featured in Chapter 3 of Malcolm Gladwell’s book, ‘Blink’.

Gladwell Warren Harding as a cautionary tale which highlights how the Interview Process can fail.

When hiring senior candidates, most firms focus on Searching for the squarest peg they can find for their square hole. They look for people with the most relevant track record and technical competencies: ideally, someone successfully doing exactly the same job elsewhere for one of their competitors. But evidence shows that this is not the best predictor of future performance.

The problem is that the main reason why hires succeed or fail is usually not due to technical skills. At Godliman, we say that people are usually hired on skills but fired on behaviours…