Tough Economy Jobs

With 2009 having just rolled around, there’s a lot of internet traffic of people looking for resume templates – forms that they can plug their contact info into and send out to employers.

This is a BAD IDEA, in capital letters. If you look like everybody else, then employers will assume you’re nothing special. BAD IDEA. (check out Louise Fletcher’s recent Blue Sky Resumes post about exactly that)

Your CV is your promotional material, like a brochure for a company. If a company sent you a brochure that they got off of a Microsoft Word template, you wouldn’t be impressed. They won’t be any more impressed if you do the same for them.

So here’s the thing. A lot goes into creating a solid CV – part of it is presentation, part of it is layout, and a lot of it is content. I’m going to cover all these things in future posts, and if you want it all right now, you can sign up for HuntingToHired.

In the meantime, though, I understand that you might absolutely need to put together a CV you can send out, and anything is better than nothing. Given that, there are better templates and worse templates to use. I did a quick survey of some of the CV templates available out there – here are a couple of places to start:

• Blue Sky Resumes has a great free e-course on resume building. Louise also did a great interview on Spin Strategy about resumes, which you should read.

• VisualCV is a cool new online system for putting something really nice together.

• Alternative Resumes and CVs worth Creating is a great article from EDUGREE that you might also want to check out.

That’s it for now. In the next bunch of posts, I’m going to be going through the concepts behind HuntingToHired. Feel free to jump in with questions, and I’ll do my best to answer them.