Make your Procurement CV outstanding now

Don’t make your opening statement ‘blurb’, make it bubble!

I see so many CVs start out with something like this.

“Passionate Procurement manager, team worker, collaborator, leader. Happy working on own initiative or working as part of a team….”

Aren’t we all?

There’s nothing particularly bad about these words. But they’re 10 a penny across all CVs. It’s generic and meaningless.

Beware of littering in buzzwords or jargon too.

You want your CV to stand out. Simply.

It’s like your headline on your LinkedIn profile.

I’ll let you into a secret, I recently recruited for a Procurement Business lead role in the business I work for and 60+ CVs landed with me (post initial screening by HR).

This is a hard truth but I only had 2hours to sift through these.

That’s just 120 seconds per CV.

Grab my attention from the start but most importantly, give specifics that are unique to you.

I use bullet points. See the below:

Delivery, not duties

I see so many getting this wrong.

A list of job titles held along with what then looks like the job description of their core responsibilities.

This tells me nothing about you.

What did you deliver when you were in role?

What was your impact and how did you smash your role?

If you need to give a description of your responsibilities (perhaps because it’s not clearly implied by your job title) keep it brief.

See my example below:

Specific numbers (not percentages)

Nobody tells you this.

But percentages are far less credible if you can’t be specific about the numbers.

I bet your CV says something like “Delivered 20% savings” or “10% margin improvements”.

It does, doesn’t it ?!

That’s fine, but include the actual numbers.

%age savings are too vague.

If you want to include the %age to give an order of magnitude, do something like this…

But note how my CV is full of actual numbers delivered. This provides specific and tangible outcomes which are measurable.*

*pro tip: be sure to know your numbers and be confident speaking about them in your interview. DO NOT MAKE ANYTHING UP!

Your biggest professional qualification under your name

MCIPS qualified?

Great! This should be by your name or at the very top of your CV.

Don’t let it get hidden in a qualifications section at the very bottom of your CV.

I’m not saying that education or professional qualifications should be the be all and end all and the best leaders will see you for what you can deliver.

Your actual professional experience counts double any professional qualification.

But…

If you’ve got…FLAUNT IT!

Keep it brief (the ideal CV length)

I’m not quite of the school of thought that the max length of a CV should be two pages.

Once you have anything beyond 10-15 years worth of experience it’s actually pretty difficult to compress this into just two pages.

But remember what I said about having just 120 seconds to read through a CV?

I don’t want to have to sift through anything more than 3 pages of A4 and honestly? If you can’t be concise on a document like this, how can I trust you to communicate concisely in a business setting?

Keep it brief, focus on your key and most relevant achievements and look to summarise your early career experience per my example below:

Interesting ‘Interests;

There’s some debate and no doubt some cultural nuances depending on which region of the world you are in.

But if you do decide to include your personal interests on your CV don’t make them something generic like “enjoy reading” or “going for walks”.

Again, don’t we all?! Or most of us anyway…

Make your interests conversation starters and specific to you.

e.g. mine below…

And don’t make it any more than two lines (max).

Did this help?

Do you want to see my CV and use it as a template for yours?

Happy New Year! And good luck in your job search (as if luck had anything to do with it).