Could 'Achievement Amnesia' cost you your career?

Conclusions

The research findings show there is a clear difference between what jobseekers think makes a great CV, and what those in a position of hiring them are actually looking for.

Whereas jobseekers rank the 'look and feel' of their CV as the number one priority, this factor does not rank in the top three list for employers who are looking for much more practical and achievement based information.

This revelation is worrying when one considers how employers - and particularly large recruiters and agencies - use people's CVs once they receive them. Although jobseekers may put a lot of effort into crafting a beautiful looking CV, the design and fancy bits get ignored because recruiters quickly turn candidate information into a stream of data that their IT systems can read.

The research also highlighted how much employers value work-based achievements - it was their second most important success factor on a CV. And the inclusion of this data can clearly have a major impact on the value employers place on candidates - almost a quarter said that candidates could expect salaries more than 15% higher if they included such information. That's an extra £3,300 on the average annual UK salary of £22,000 - not a small sum.

Yet, almost three quarters of employers had rejected candidates for failing to include this information, suggesting that jobseekers exhibit 'achievement amnesia' when writing CVs.

Is this achievement amnesia a symptom of a quintessentially British unwillingness to 'sell' or 'talk up' our achievements? Possibly, but the research seemed to suggest that it has more to do with the way that we all compile CVs - often relegating CV writing only to times when we start looking for work, and spending less than two hours on the task. And clearly, we're struggling to remember the great things we've done when it really matters.

All of this brings into question whether the traditional CV as we know it is still the best way to go about presenting ourselves for jobs. Should we now be considering new ways to evolve the CV, bringing it up to date in the way that so many other things have been in the digital age?

Certainly, the current obsession with the look and feel of a CV should be dropped, or at least de-emphasised. And, if we are to attain the jobs we want and the salaries we deserve, we need to change the way we think about recording our achievements as well - making it an ongoing process.

One way to address these issues is to make use of the new online tools that are available to help create modern CVs that give jobseekers a single place on the Internet to record all of their achievements and experience. The best of these allow jobseekers to update them as often as they like - not just when looking for a new job, but throughout their career, for example when they achieve something great at work, or if they pass a new training course.

These new CV and career management services also have another advantage: they 'automatically' present candidate information to recruiters in the way they need it. Recruiters have to process thousands of CVs every day and love online CVs because they're system-friendly and always up-to-date. This makes them easier to process and therefore increases the chance that jobseekers are matched to the right opportunities.

This, surely, is in everyone's interest.