CV writing advice - How to present your previous employment experience

In this blog post I’ll cover how you should present your previous employment experience, what to include and discard, and how far back you should go.

The first thing to cover is how this information is presented. List your experience in bullet points rather than sentences. This makes the information you are providing easier to read and understand for the recruiter.

When writing your bullet points, elaborate on your duties to show tangible achievements that came as a result of your actions, this shows you are an achiever, rather than a do-er (pronounced dooer).

Let’s look at a typical example.

Cold-called potential clients prospecting for new business

Sure, this explains what you did, but there’s a million of other candidates out there who do the same. This is a poor description and doesn’t set you aside from other candidates.

Compare it with:

Cold-called in excess of twenty new clients per day, maintaining a $50 thousand-dollar pipeline that generated in excess of €20 thousand euros in extra revenue per month.

This clearly demonstrates what the result of your duty was. In the first example, you might be making the calls, but how does the recruiter know if this led to any benefit for your previous company if you fail to tell them?

Detail only the duties of the positions that are relevant to the new position you are applying for, and keep the history to a maximum of ten years. The fact you provided excellent customer service at MacDonald’s 20 years ago, isn’t relevant to you managing a team of IT technicians now, so omit it.

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