Europass Cv Editor: Frustrating Interface
We tried to create a personal Europass CV online and found the experience extremely frustrating. Once again, this may be subjective, but try it yourself and see if you agree. First you have to create a profile with your contact info, work experience, education, languages and a LOT of unnecessary categories that you can fortunately skip. If you filled out all the options, you might end up with a 10-page CV.
Once your profile is done, you reach an apparent dead end. There is no Next or Download CV button, so you have to go searching for it. We spent almost half an hour trying to figure out what to do next, and we almost gave up.
We finally figured out that you have to click on the Me button which provides a drop-down menu that offers no help. By pure accident, we discovered that you have to click on the Me button TWICE to find the Create A CV option.
On the next page, if you miss the instruction that you have to select the parts of your profile to include on your CV, youll download a document that contains nothing but your name! Why would anyone create an option that allows you to download a CV that contains nothing but your name?
Nearly an hour had passed with no resume in sight. Just a blank document. At this stage, we were pretty frustrated and questioning our decision to sign up for the Europass CV service.
Rule 2 Proper Spacing Is Important
Never clutter pages in an attempt to shorten your resume.
Review and narrow down any unnecessary sections to generate more space. If more room is needed, simply extend to an additional page by adding relevant skills or experiences.
Note: While double spacing is a bit much and single spacing begins to look fairly cluttered, Ive found 1.5 spacing to work best.
You can alter the fonts and tweak the format, but dont go overboard. It still has to catch the hiring managers eye.
Get Guidance On When You Should Send A One
The right resume length depends entirely on your background.
Resume length is among the biggest quandaries for job seekers. The presiding belief is that if its too long, you risk a hiring manager not reading the whole thing if its too short, you might look like you dont have enough experience. For all the times youve wondered, How long should a resume be? you probably figured the universe has decided on an answer by now. Alas. Theres no magic resume length that works for everyone.
The trick is figuring out the best number of pages for your situation. Follow these tips.
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You Havent Moved Around Much
You may have several years of experience, but perhaps its with the same one or two companies, or in a role without much change. If your experience has been fairly steady, then the reality is that you may not have enough to fill in more than a page, even if youve been working for several years. In this instance, the single-page resume allows you to call out key accomplishments and achievements without getting too wordy.
How To Prepare A Great European Cv
Many employers seeing another Europass CV cross their desk may choose to set it aside in favor of a professionally designed CV that actually looks nice. So at times, using the Europass can actually do more harm than good. Its design flaws explain why there are so many articles on the web with titles like Why Europass is harming your career chances.
Youre better off with just about any other plan. Use a professional resumepreparation service, where youll pay a fee, but its well worth it. Youll find more template options, more intuitive builder tools and an easier editing process. Most important, youll get a much better final product.
Or if you have any design skills whatsoever, do the job yourself. You can draw inspiration from multiple samples online. Fire up a laptop, launch Microsoft Word and go to work. It would be difficult to do a worse job than Europass does.
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Europass Cv Writing Tips
Design questions aside, you at least have full control over the text you provide on a Europass CV. Make your writing concise but compelling, using strong action verbs and vivid adjectives to describe your qualifications for the job, your past job-related achievements and your special skills. Weve actually compiled a list of 300+ powerful action verbs you can use in your CV.
Avoid clichés like self-starter, team player or thinking outside the box. Strive for fresh, original language that recruiters havent seen a thousand times before. And avoid fluff, which is language that sounds fancy but conveys no real information.
Be specific, using facts and figures where possible to quantify your accomplishments in past jobs. And try to avoid repeating words, especially in close succession, like Improved work-flow processes, among other productivity improvements.
Given the space-wasting design of the Europass CV, youll need to keep your text as short as possible if you hope to make everything fit on one page. One solution is to trim your text to eliminate widows, which are solitary words at the end of a text block or bullet point that spill over on an additional line, making the entire document one line deeper. By trimming a word or two somewhere in these text blocks, you can usually eliminate these space-eating fragments at the bottom.
Contributions To Resume Length
There arent many hard and fast answers when it comes to how long a resume should be. Its dependent on the specifics of your personal experiences. Some factors that determine your resume length include:
- How long youve been working
- How long youve been working in your target field
- How much youve moved up within your field
- How many times youve changed jobs
- Whether or not youve completed higher education
- Whether your higher education aligns with your target field
- The depth of your skill set relevant to the job
- Whether your field is highly technical and/or project-based
These and other aspects of your experience might compound into a resume draft that is four or five or ten pages long. Theres no harm in a long first draft, but just as the Changing Times article suggests, the next step is to cut ruthlessly.
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Format Your Cover Letter Properly
- Set the margins to one inch on every side.
- Choose the best cover letter fonts and make sure theyre in the 1014pt range.
- Use single or 1.15 line spacing. Dont use double line spacing in a cover letter.
- Make good use of white space. It gives your cover letter breathing room.
Mention one of your biggest achievements thats relevant to the position youre targeting.
For more details, read our dedicated guide on how to start a cover letter in a captivating way.
And
Learn how to address your cover letter properly to stand out from the other applicants right off the bat.
Make It Through The Ats
First, a longer resume allows you to craft a resume that will successfully make it through the Applicant Tracking System . ATS are used by the vast majority of companies. They are designed to choose only those that most closely match the job description and weed out the rest.
Your resume will only be seen by a human if it successfully makes it through the ATS scan. As a result, part of your goal needs to be ensuring that your resume meets ATS requirements.
What are those requirements? First, the ATS scans to ensure that resumes match the keywords in the job description. You must match the keywords to make it through successfully.
Second, they also scan for the frequency of keywords. As a result, successful applicants need to ensure both the existence of keywords and sufficient frequency throughout the resume. Frankly, ensuring keyword frequency without monotony may be hard to do without two pages.
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The Ideal Cover Letter Length
Cut to the chase
Your cover letter should be between half a page and one page long, consist of four paragraphs, and shouldnt exceed 200-350 words. Be concise and at the same time grab attention. If you make your cover letter too long, the recruiter wont read it. If its word count is too low, though, your cover letter will look sloppy.
So, learn these numbers by heart:
This is how long a cover letter should be
- 1 page
Now, lets now break this down into several more specific questions.
How Far Back Should A Resume Go For Mid/senior
For a vast majority of applicants and job seekers out there, a two-pager resume is the ideal way to go.
According to Darlene Nason – coach, speaker and trainer – it becomes extremely difficult for a professional who has an experience of 10+ years to limit their resume to a one pager.
A two-pager resume is good enough. How far back should a resume go depends on your target profile. If you’ve been in the same role since the beginning and are targeting something similar, you can skip your most initial profiles.
Example:Let’s say you were in development for 5 years and switched to project management for 3 years. In case you wish to return to development, you can gloss over your PM experience – or better still, emphasize upon the development aspect during your PM tenure – and focus more on your development-based achievements.
Many people fear interviews, but you don’t get a chance to appear for one if your resume is not up to the mark. If your resume is not showcasing significant qualifications, or is not able to convince the recruiter, you don’t get a shot at the interview, period.
Example:Let’s consider the scenario where your resume is extending to two pages. For the HR, this barely translates to a few more seconds, maybe 30 additional seconds on your resume if you are extremely lucky. But think from the perspective of the HR. It’s beneficial for them to spend those additional 30 seconds than call a candidate with questionable credentials for a personal interaction session.
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The More Concise The Better
Communicating your most important and relevant information as briefly as possible is crucial. Recruiters and employers only have a few moments to decide whether or not your resume is a good fit for the role. In keeping with this practice, be critical of every point you include on your resume. Here are a few ways to make your resume more concise:
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Instead of including every job duty for each position youve held at every company youve been at, consider including two to three bullet points of quantified achievements.
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Avoid using filler words, such as that, the, a, an or like.
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Consider removing experiences or information that may not be relevant to the position youre applying for.
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Study the job description to get a better idea of what the employer may be looking for in your resume and what potential keywords to include.
Use Italicized Vs Bolded
One last trick you can try is reducing the number of bolded words you have throughout your resume.
This may help if your resume currently has one or two lines that are spilling over to another page.
If you are trying to emphasize a point, try changing the bolded words to italicized to see how much space that saves you.
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Case Study: Mias Three Page Research Assistant Resume
Mia has been working in immunology for many years.
From her undergraduate work to her current postdoctoral work Her drive to make a difference in the world has produced publications, presentations, and awards.
In her pursuit of postdoctoral research, demonstrating her expertise in the field is an absolute must. There are also expectations of an academic resume to put simply, having the correct style and streamlining your design.
To produce a resume to satisfy these conditions as well as discussing her previous work, a three-page resume was needed.
So far with all the case studies, have you noticed any similarities?
Firstly, theyre modern resumes which stand out. Above all, its the resume design and the way it highlights key information such as your certifications and different types of skills by using appropriate visual aspects. This is what makes them so compelling for the hiring manager.
Chances are, the recruiters at your company arent used to seeing a modern resume like this. So, making an impression and getting your foot in the door isnt difficult.
If youre unsure what to write and trying to cope with writers block, Enhancv makes the entire resume building process easier for you.
When youre using any of these proven examples, you have a resume in front of you thats gotten someone hired in the most competitive spaces. More importantly, they could just be like you.
These resume templates are free.
Choosing Resume Formats For Appropriate Lengths
Formatting your resume can be incredibly overwhelming.
This is one of the reasons so many candidates use our resume-building software.
Because they donât need to ever worry about formatting issues.
Overall, there are several different types of formats that are out there with no real guidance about which one would work best for you.
For example, the three most common resume formats are:
Now, while several of these templates can work, it is important to understand how your format can both tell your story based on your experience and limit your resume to the most appropriate length.
You have to assume that the further down the resume you go, the fewer hiring managers are going to read it.
So regardless of the resume format, it is actually more important to start your resume with a brief summary statement.
Why? Because usually the resume summary will be the first thing a recruiter reads besides your name, and this is common across every resume format.
Instead, use this space to write something engaging that makes the reader want to learn more about your story and your objectives.
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How Long Should A Resume Be For A College Student
For the typical student or recent grad beginning their job hunt, a one-page resume is typically enough. Its almost always possible to put your relevant education, technical skills, internships and past work experience in a single page as an entry-level job seeker.
However, there are exceptions. If you held multiple jobs and internships, or if youre a PhD student who has published papers and research, then you may find yourself using a two-page resume even as an entry-level job seeker. This is acceptable and will not cost you jobs.
Hiring Managers Want Clear Career Stories
Second, a study by TopResume on professional vs self-written resumes found that employers value resumes that provide a strong career narrative. In other words, recruiters want to see more than merely a timeline of your professional and educational experience they want to be able to read your resume like a story. In order to create that story, your resume requires additional components such as a professional summary, a section to list your relevant experience, skills etc. all of which take up more space.
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Improve Your Resumes Formatting
Finally, a longer resume allows you to pay attention to readability and presentation. Some job seekers resort to small type and meager margins to make a resume fit in one page.
But small type and narrow margins are not good for readability and presentation. In fact, they make resumes hard to read. Many hiring managers may shrink from reading teeny-tiny type all, even if the resume has made it through the ATS.
Human personnel spend just a few seconds skimming resumes. Successful resumes need to incorporate that fact, and be very easy to skim. Easy-to-read type and reasonable margins contribute to readability, as do bullet points and lists.
Specifically, use at least an 11-point typeface in a standard business typeface, such as Ariel or Calibri. Each margin should be at least one inch.
When youre using a two-page resume, part of the presentation should consider the second page, too. Be sure to fill at least one-third of the second page. Why? Because if the second page covers less than that, it may strike a reviewer as a tacked-on afterthought. In fact, if it fills just a few lines on the second page, it may look like a mistake. Make sure it neither looks nor reads that way!
Is There A Consensus On How Long Should A Resume Be
Many people feel that a one pager resume is too short. At the same time, there seems to be no universal consensus when it comes to how long should a resume be.
- Conventional opinion dictates that two pages is the ideal length of resume.
- Many people are willing to extend the maximum resume length to 3 pages
- If your resume is more than 2 pages, your ability to prioritize is put under the scanner
The basic idea remains the same. If your resume is extending to two pages, each and every point should justify the usage of the second page.
Another trend which impacted the question of resume length is the transition from scanning print outs of resumes to browsing through them on a screen. Because of this, opinions of many recruiters seems to not stay constant when it comes to how long should a resume be.
Resumes that would have been flagged in the era of print are now deemed to be acceptable in the digital age.
Providing necessary details > Page Length
When people ask ‘How many pages should a resume be?’, our next response is to elicit a comprehensive resume from their end.
Recruiters would actually prefer a 3 pager resume if it showcases all the qualifications and experiences required for the preferred profile, instead of a 2 pager resume that was trimmed down but lacks the necessary impact.
As long as the points in your resume are accurate, verifiable and pertinent, resume length as a factor takes a backseat.
Capture attention in the first page
Leave no white spaces
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