What Does Your Relationship With Your CV Say About You?

I find the psychology around CVs really interesting, because your relationship with your CV probably tells you more about yourself than you think, and the way you avoid it, neglect it, obsess over it, keep it updated or leave it untouched for five years can be a reflection of how engaged you actually are with your career.

We speak to graduates who don't know their A-Level grades, experienced recruiters who can't remember their full work history, and recruiters who don't know what they billed last year, and I always find that surprising because these aren't obscure details someone else has decided are important, they are the basic facts of your own professional story.

Perhaps some people simply don't spend much time reflecting on their career until they suddenly want another job, and that is probably part of the problem, because if the only time you think about what you have achieved, what you have learned, what you have earned and where you are going is when somebody asks you for a CV, then updating it suddenly becomes a much bigger psychological exercise than it should be.

You are no longer just adding a job, you are having to reconstruct the last few years of your life, work out what you actually achieved, remember your numbers, decide whether you are proud of your progress and then package the whole thing for somebody else to judge, and I can understand why people avoid that, because a CV can become a slightly uncomfortable mirror.

It might remind you that you have stayed somewhere longer than you intended, that your billings haven't moved for three years, that you never properly tracked your achievements, that you don't actually know what your commission scheme has paid you, or perhaps that you have been so busy doing the job that you have stopped thinking about where the job is taking you.

But avoidance doesn't make any of that disappear.

And this is where I think your relationship with your CV becomes quite revealing, because people who know their numbers, remember their achievements and keep some kind of record of their career usually aren't doing it because they love writing CVs, they are doing it because they have a level of ownership over their professional life and they are paying attention to what is happening to them.

I see something similar when I speak to somebody, give them three very small changes to make and then spend the next few days waiting for them to do it, because straight after our conversation is probably the easiest possible moment to action those changes, the feedback is fresh, you know exactly what needs doing and in many cases the whole thing would take ten minutes.

So why doesn't it happen?

Sometimes I think we convince ourselves that small jobs need the perfect moment, we will update the CV properly tonight, we will look at it over the weekend, we will find the exact billing figures later, and what could have been a ten-minute action becomes another open loop sitting somewhere in the back of our mind.

That might sound insignificant, but in recruitment particularly I think it is worth paying attention to, because the job itself is basically thousands of small decisions about whether to act now or later, whether to make the slightly uncomfortable call or avoid it, whether to follow up while something is warm or come back to it tomorrow, whether to close the loop or allow another thing to sit on the list.

If you are somebody who continually delays a ten-minute CV amendment when you actively want a new job, it might be worth asking yourself whether you do the same thing elsewhere, because the issue might not really be your CV at all.

Do you put calls you need to make?

Do you avoid opening post?

Do you leave difficult conversations longer than you should?

Do you have twenty tiny jobs constantly floating around because none of them feels urgent enough to do now?

Do you have goals and know how far you are from achieving them?

The formatting side interests me for the same reason, because there really isn't much excuse anymore for sending a CV that is messy, inconsistent and difficult to read when AI can help you format it in minutes, for free, and you don't need to be a designer or particularly good with Word to create something professional.

Again, perhaps it isn't really about formatting.

Perhaps it is about care.

Your CV is the paper representation of you before you walk into the room, it is one of the few parts of a recruitment process that you have almost complete control over, and if you haven't bothered to make sure the dates are right, your achievements are there, your numbers are accurate and the thing actually looks presentable, what does that say about how much ownership you are taking over the process?

So perhaps there is a useful exercise here, rather than only updating your CV when you want another job, look at it every few months and ask yourself what has actually changed, what have I achieved, what numbers am I proud of, what have I learned, what responsibility have I gained and is my career moving in the direction I thought it would?

Keep a simple record of your numbers and achievements as you go, because trying to remember twelve months of performance retrospectively is far harder than writing down a good month when it happens, and if you are in recruitment you really should know your billings, placements, promotions, markets, major wins and anything else that demonstrates how you have performed.

And when somebody gives you a small amendment to make, do it while the friction is low, because there is something incredibly useful about developing the habit of closing the loop rather than carrying tiny jobs around with you for days.

Most importantly, don't treat your CV as something you only need when you are unhappy.

Treat it as a record of your career.

Because perhaps the healthiest relationship you can have with your CV is one where opening it doesn't create panic, embarrassment or three hours of detective work, because you already know what you have done, you know what you have achieved and you have been paying attention to your own progress all along.

Your CV might be a document, but your relationship with it can tell you quite a lot.

And if looking at yours makes you uncomfortable, perhaps the most interesting question isn't what needs changing on the CV.

Perhaps it’s; what is causing this avoidance and how is it effecting my life?