As a certified CV writer, I have written thousands of CVs by this stage. And god knows how many I’ve read, but it’s gotta be close to 10,000!
Lots of CVs have been written by people who just make a CV based on what they think should be there, or what they were taught many, many moons ago. And a lot of that has been outdated in today’s world.
Winning Over Recruiters and Hiring Managers
By tailoring those core competencies and matching them, you get in front of a recruiter quicker.
When the recruiter is reviewing hundreds of CVs starting in that order, they want to see the skills they’re looking for at a glance.
They need to easily identify that they’re the right skills the hiring manager is looking for.
Recruiters by nature will spend more time than hiring managers trying to find them. But why not make it easier for them? Because they can then put it forward to the hiring managers.
Taking the time to get that right will make sure your CV gets to the next stage and goes straight to a hiring manager.
And once it gets to the hiring manager, they are juggling 5,000 other different things. They’re obviously short of headcount in their team. They’re time poor, basically.
You’ve got to make it as easy as possible.
If they can see a core competency very clearly that matches the roles they’re looking for, they’re going to want to read on. That’s the key thing.
Hiring managers will take six to eight seconds to decide if they’re interested or not.
If you pique their interest with this core competency section, they’re going to want to read on.
How to Write Your Core Competencies
This is exactly how you write the core competencies.
Work out what your key skills are. Try and look at your experience, and use AI if you need to in terms of extracting those kinds of skills from it to work out what your skills bank actually is.
Then from there, write down each of the skills and list those all out.
Once you’ve done that, write a two to three-line description. Better if it’s two, actually.
It needs to showcase the level of competency that you’ve got. And this is the absolute key thing that people are missing.
When you’ve got your core competencies or skills, I normally just see a list of skills.
Whereas if you write project management with a brief description of project management, that showcases not just that you’ve got those skills, but you’ve actually got the competency and the level of detail too.
A two to three-line, very high-level summary gives that overall piece, and that’s what catches the attention.
Then at the very bottom, have your tools and methodologies. This is where you’d list your tech stack.
And any methodologies you use, like Prince2 for example. List all of those in one place so people can see them and recognise you’ve got those skills and capabilities available.
The Final Polish
Finally, and most importantly, remember to tailor it.
Tailor it for each of the roles you’re going forward for. You might have a skills bank of 20 of these.
If you have a look at the job description, you can move 10. Try not to have more than 10 in total.
Make sure it’s all in there in one space.
To help you with this, I have a free CV template so you can see exactly how this looks.
What you need to do, if you’re thinking of how you need to take things forward and get more interviews, is have a look at that core competency section.
And if you don’t have skills with descriptions listed in your top 10, add it in and make sure that it’s there for you.
Key Takeaways
- Don’t just dump a list of skills onto your CV, add a two to three-line description to your core competencies to actually showcase your level of detail and capability.
- Tailoring your core competencies to the specific keywords in the job description helps the ATS rank you higher, ensuring you don’t fall to the bottom of the recruiter’s pile.
- Hiring managers are juggling 5,000 things and are incredibly time poor, so you only have six to eight seconds to pique their interest and make them want to read on.
Good luck with your job searches this week, and if you’d like to learn how I can help you further, book a free, no-obligation 30-minute consultation with me and tell me your story.
