CV Hell: Son of CV rides again

[j4]

Yes, j4 is still whinging about jobs.

I phoned the University Temporary Employment Services (i.e. cam.ac.uk temp agency) and, obviously, they want me to send them a CV. And now I'm having a crisis of confidence to the effect that my CV is too crap to send to anybody.

My current CV looks like this, only it usually looks a bit neater since I've just hastily converted it from Word format to text-only so that people won't whine at me about not being able to see it in Lynx or on their Palm. 8-) I've got several interviews with this CV (usually accompanied by a covering letter or application form), so it can't be utterly hopeless, but.

Should I:

a) send this CV off, and stop dithering?
b) make a few changes (suggestions welcome!)?
c) rewrite it completely tonight and send it off tomorrow?

[Sorry, not a real poll, because I can't be arsed.]

Comments

[abi]

I'll go with b) - my suggested changes are on the work experience front. Reasoning: where I work, one of the things we look at on a CV is how much an applicant has written about each of their previous jobs. From a potential employer's POV the more recent work experience tends to be rated more importantly than things you did four or five years ago, and therefore (IMO) you need to beef up at least the section on ProQuest by another few lines - not much effort, and *very* likely to win points. We tend to assume (and the wider world may do so as well) that if you don't write much about your current employment then you must hate your job, and you've applied for our vacancy not because you particularly want it, but because you're desperate to get out of what you're doing. Writing lots about your job is interpreted to mean that you're enthusiastic about it (and about work in general), which is better. Even if it isn't true, it still looks good to pretend.

Qualifier to this statement: you may be using the covering letter to write at length about your current employment, in which case ignore the above.

Hope that helps. :)

[j4.livejournal.com]

We tend to assume (and the wider world may do so as well) that if you don't write much about your current employment then you must hate your job, and you've applied for our vacancy not because you particularly want it, but because you're desperate to get out of what you're doing.

Well, the immediate need is for a CV to send to a temp agency... IME people don't apply to temp agencies because they desperately want to do temp work for the rest of their lives, they apply to temp agencies because they need short-term work! :) I already left my full-time job, because I did hate it; my "current employment" is only freelance work (for the same company, though).

Will try to put a bit more info about the current job though. The problem is it's not very clearly defined what my role is, and I end up getting into a lot of explanation. The thing is, they hired me as an editorial assistant, then I learned Perl and since then I've been an editorial assistant who writes Perl for them, and as such I scuppered all my chances of promotion and got stuck reinventing the same wheel multiple times while they went on about how great it was that they could get me to write code yet they didn't have to pay me as much as they'd pay a software engineer. Hrmph. So I quit (thinking I had another job lined up), and that fell through, and I came back here as a freelancer, and have been stuck here ever since (that was about 6 months ago, dear god, HALF A YEAR of my LIFE wasted).

Urghhhh.