A CV is the first impression you make on a company. This is the one page piece of paper that shows all of your skills and qualifications. Now if it were up to you, this CV would be more than just a page and be filled to the brim with detail about who you are and why you are so important to this company. Unfortunately, you cannot do this. Keeping your CV short means cutting out the pieces that are not very necessary. That volunteer works you did over your winter break? Keep that, it shows some extracurricular activities and humanitarian efforts.

That time you won first place in a boxcar race? Not as important to the employer as other information may be. The employer wants it to be straight, simple and to the point. Trim the fat and keep it clean. Make sure all of the information on the page is relevant. You may have to create several CVs that are all tweaked for the specific jobs you are applying to. Do not repeat yourself. For the various job experience sections try not to say the same thing over and over again. This gets redundant and mundane and lacks any creativity. Try to avoid having too much white space. This means fluffing up the sections you have so that it fills every crevice, but not making it too wordy.

The more words on the page the more bored the employer will get while reading your CV. Another thing you can do is touch upon things that are mentioned in your cover letter. Like if you talk about a previous job that you had in the cover letter, make sure that appears near the top of your CV. This shows continuity and will reinforce it in the minds of the employers. You will also want to make sure that it is the same information on both pieces, getting caught with two different stories is something that can become quite difficult to deal with. Getting to the point is the best thing you can do. Utilizing concise writing styles is very beneficial to you in the long run.

You don’t have to go down memory lane to explain every detail of every job you’ve ever had. Briefly write the key details and how they helped you develop in that career, and that is all you need. Your CV can make or break a job interview, if it is too wordy then they might not get all the way through it, if there are not enough words then they might not know who you are. The sweet spot for a CV is one page in length and around 650 words in total. This is an easy enough amount to ready and should be able to properly display who you are as an individual and an employee.