Sheffield businessman slates the unemployed

He wasn't giving just a few words but at the same time he wasn't going into enough detail by the sounds of. He need to tell more of a story and go from A to B to C, etc .

Not obvious to everyone clearly?

Not everyone is good at interviews Cyclone, I'm refer to me not my husband BTW. Lots of people find getting a job hard (I again include myself in that).

We use STAR as well, a quick line or two to describe the situation you were faced with, an account of what you did about it, a description of how you went about the task and then the result. The higher grade you are are applying for the bigger the result should be i.e. influencing national policy rather then getting a couple of grand local yield.

When I applied outside the civil service they also used STAR.

I like your condescending tone and maybe in your field CVs are alive and well, (along with the dinosaurs) but I guarantee you, in most developed countries and professions they are outdated and considered bad-practice, not just for entry level jobs but right up to the CEO.

You really have a very low understanding of what a professional CV is. In fact I would go as far as that you have no idea. If you have to write about hobbies, interests and what you did at school to help pad out two sides of A4, then you haven't got a professional CV.

I work for probably the most highly regarded engineering company in the country and we use CVs. What does that tell you? Other than your beliefs about CVs are wrong.

Most of those listed require you to complete a template ... which to all intents and purposes, comprises a CV plus a few more particular answers to show how the CV contains examples of experience to meet the job description.

 

The main content of a CV is your employment history, which is exactly what all those employers require in their forms.

Thank you for that. Much clearer now.

Regards

Angel1.

You really have a very low understanding of what a professional CV is. In fact I would go as far as that you have no idea. If you have to write about hobbies, interests and what you did at school to help pad out two sides of A4, then you haven't got a professional CV.

 

I work for probably the most highly regarded engineering company in the country and we use CVs. What does that tell you? Other than your beliefs about CVs are wrong.

No it tells us that CVs have changed and no longer ask about interests and hobbies which they used to do in the past, which made them irrelevant because everyone knew putting down reading and going for solitary birdwatching wasn't going to impress whilst pretending you volunteered at the local hospital and took part in International Rugby sevens would do. Even if you didn't.

No, I don't think that's quite correct.

I expect that school leavers and people in the first few years of work probably do still put down interests and hobbies.

And if they lie and put that they volunteer then I expect they come undone very quickly in an interview.

I can't even remember if mine still has a line about hobbies, it might do, it probably says that I teach martial arts, having trained for 21 years and chair the regional association for my style. Which sometimes results in a conversation, other times is ignored.

Checked - appears that I removed it some time ago to save space.

No, I don't think that's quite correct.

I expect that school leavers and people in the first few years of work probably do still put down interests and hobbies.

And if they lie and put that they volunteer then I expect they come undone very quickly in an interview.

I can't even remember if mine still has a line about hobbies, it might do, it probably says that I teach martial arts, having trained for 21 years and chair the regional association for my style. Which sometimes results in a conversation, other times is ignored.

My CV does include 1 line about hobbies and it nearly always get asked about at interview which gives a great opportunity to have a chat with the interviewer about life rather than just the job. For me I want to feel comfortable with my colleagues and I want an environment where I feel instantly at home and discussions about things not directly related to the job help to gain this understanding. I have turned job what on paper was an excellent job with quite a big pay rise as I didn't have any connection with the interviewer who would have been my manager and I didn't want to risk a personality conflict with him.

As Cyclone and others have said, your CV or application form is about selling yourself and if your hobbies are an important part of your life and you think it's a talking point then add them. If you do a lot of interviewing you can tell an awful lot about someone's personality by a CV and hence why we use them rather than an application form as we want to see things like layout, use of colour, which software was used to write the CV and because I'm an IT pedant if it's not in PDF format I look at the mark-up view so I can see how the did the formatting - did they use proper left/right alignment or did they space or tab it across. Sounds daft and pointless, and I'd never not interview someone on that basis alone, but it possibly tells me a bit about how they work, or that they don't know how to word edit properly!