We recently ran our Campus Representatives Lunch where we gather all our representatives (we have one at every leading university in every academic year) and talk to them about careers. Surely in this day and age (with Facebook, Twitter and Linked-in) students still don’t need CVs? To a certain extent this is correct – as a job hunter you can present a lot of information on your profiles – particularly around experiences and education. However despite these whizzy profiles, the CV will live on. But why? Well, CVs aren’t really there to convey the basic subjective information – they tell you a lot more than that, in a very objective way that allows us to find our more. Can the candidate write clearly? How do they present complex information? Do they care about the details like how the CV is formatted or punctuated? All of these indicators are economic sign-posts as to how they are likely to perform in the role. We had one CV submitted recently where the candidate had spelt their name incorrectly. If they can’t even be bothered to check the little details when trying to get a job, are they going to be detail-orientated when they join you? Probably not. One candidate recently sent us a six page CV – if they can’t appreciate the pressures on people’s time to go through every page do they have the right level of awareness? So, CVs are great, if not for the reasons often thought – like a lot of things, for a hunch to give us more information – after all, apparently the average time spent reviewing a CV on first glance is just 12 seconds, so you had better make it good.
James Uffindell, MD and Founder of The Bright Network
James started his first business aged nine, another one at 14. In his last year at university James setup an organisation, Oxbridge Applications, to help people apply to university and at 25, went on to co-found a social enterprise. While James has lived and breathed the commercial world for 10 years, when he left university he really had no idea as to what to do, or even how to go about it.
While some friends found their way into investment banking and law, many were left baffled and floundering. As James met more and more bright graduates who felt similarly, lacking in guidance he decided to set up The Bright Network.
