How to write a good CV?

Now there are lots of people who are great and wrote very clear guidelines on how to write a CV but this is my point of view from the CVs I read and how we deal with these CVs.

One of the important things that distinguishes Jordanian companies from others is that HR departments do not exist or if exists are very small and is taking care of "Time and Attendance, vacations and leave requests", therefore the burden of reading, categorizing and selecting the people to interview is on the shoulders of the department manager or company manager and making your CV hard will encourage that manager to put your CV on top of the pile "To be read later" or to be thrown (demonstrated in the image below).

There are very important points that applicants usually miss and those points might get you hired or not, the following is the list of those points:

1. Send it in PDF format not doc, rtf, docx, odt, etc ... since there are different office suites that might render your CV wrong if the format is different (docx looks weird on LibreOffice)
2. Use regular and commonly used fonts since using an odd font might not appear on PDF file if that font is not installed on the machine
3. Name your CV properly (FirstName_LastName_CV.pdf)
4. Write an Executive Summary or introduction about yourself or your objectives and the position you want to be hired for it will easy categorizing the CV
5. Make it short and simple, over-writing will fire back at you
6. Do not mention something if you are not ready to be asked about it, stuffing your CV with all the possible words that you heard will not do you any good
7. Do not use over-used words, try to write your CV in as genuine way as possible and do not use words such as "Your growing company", "Your excellent leadership" and other things or descriptions that most probably you do not know about
8. Spell check your CV and audit its grammar, its not good for you to send a CV with typos and grammatically wrong sentences
9. And yes we know that you are a team player and can work under pressure, that's written in all CVs
10. And yes we know that you have great ability to learn and adapt, try something new
11. Your CV should show your passion
12. Your CV should show your knowledge and experience

Format your CV properly, check it on different machines, write it, read it, re-write it and re-read it multiple times before you send it and it should not exceed 2-4 pages (2 less experience - 4 high experience), I received a CV from a less than one year experience guy and his CV was 5 pages, I got bored reading it, too many spaces, too many repeating himself, etc ...

Finally, if you are not ready for the interview and need to get prepared ask to put the time at later time but do not come to an interview for software developer position and you do not know what is software development, object-oriented, development technologies or not knowing the concepts.

Hope this helps you and others,

Your Sincerely,

Someone suffering from CVs