Tailoring for success

Posted on July 2021 By Judy Cole
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As an SAP consultant (whatever your skillset) you have many strings to your bow, so much so that it can be hard to know what to include in your CV when applying for a role.

There are many different sides to us and to our skillsets, but you do not want potential employers or agencies seeing too many sides in a pile of completely different CVs.

The last thing you need when embarking on your job search is to already have multiple CVs featuring varying job titles and skills floating around in the market – although often innocent this can seem as if you're telling a few white lies about your specific skills.

So, below are a few pointers on how to tailor your CV effectively for the role you hope to secure:

  • Always have an accurate base CV that details each role that you have performed. In SAP, we find that our customers do not think that less is more, but prefer a longer and more detailed CV rather than the “fashionable” two-pagers.

  • When tailoring a CV, aim to detail your experiences that match the responsibilities of the role for which you are applying. Those are skills that should already be in your base CV, but you didn’t previously feel the need to expand.

  • Don't 'bend the truth’. If you are trying to bulk out relevant information to a specific role then ensure it is related to a task that YOU were responsible for and not just your team – it is more obvious than you may think.

  • When submitting a tailored CV to a company that you know may have another copy of your CV, call first and let them know you have added in more relevant information into your fresh CV for this role. This will eliminate any confusion that there may be around different versions of your CV and it is a great excuse to call and sell yourself. At the same time you can ask them to remove any other copies of your CV or ask them not to save the latest CV as it’s only relevant for this role.

  • Ensure your LinkedIn matches your CV. LInkedIn is a great checking tool for employers. It’s harder to exaggerate your responsibilities when your whole team can see what you have written.

*Tip*

It is not lost on us that some organisations have weird and wonderful role titles that are not standard within your industry - my current favourite is ‘Talent Evangelist’ - you’re a recruiter mate!) - unfortunately, this doesn't help you when applying for roles, especially when some people may do a simple CV word search to discount you from a role!

If you do have a weird and wonderful title, then my advice would be to keep your company title and then in brackets write the standard market title next to it: Talent Evangelist (Recruitment Consultant).

This ensures that it still matches your employment contract and the terminology used by the organisation (handy when at reference stage), but it won't discount you from those pesky word searches.