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Style: CVs on CDs?
by David Blakey
Is it a good idea to have your CV on a CD? Or is there something else that you can put on CDs?
[Monday 12 April 2004]
I was recently asked for advice about whether a consultant should have their résumé (or CV) on a CD. I shall share my advice here.
My first advice is: you should decide on the content before you decide on the medium.
This is the kind of advice that consultants regularly give their clients. Sometimes we forget to follow it ourselves. So, what do you want the world to know about you?
Many CVs are in .doc or .rtf formats. So, consider if there is an advantage to having your resume.doc document on a CD rather than on paper.
In my view, paper is better. Send a printed copy of a relatively short CV on good quality paper. Make it durable by putting it into a cover.
If you have a longer CV, there may be an advantage in putting this on CD. I doubt it. People are still unlikely to scroll through long documents. They are even less likely to print it out.
You might consider putting a copy of your website onto a CD.
I do not know what this achieves. You cannot update the copy, so, if a client looks at it several months later, they will not see your latest achievements. They may be looking for your experience in a relatively new area, and you may have done some recent work in that area. It will not be on the CD.
I prefer up-to-date searchable CVs on websites.
There may be technical problems with copying websites to CD, as you will have to include all the code necessary for server-side execution onto the CD.
Some people put copies of presentations onto CDs. I have never seen any value in this. The person that you send them to is hardly likely to want to spend time playing a PowerPoint presentation unless it has direct relevance to them. In that case, you should be there, making the presentation personally.
Movies can be good on CDs. They are certainly likely to play more reliably from a CD rather than from the Internet. If you can put together a really good video that demonstrates your experience in a particular area, it can have a strong impact. There you are, with executives of an oil company outside their head office in Houston. There you are again, in hard hat, talking to people in Western and in Saudi clothes, with the flares from the Dammam oilfield behind you. Movies like that show that you have been there, done that
.
There are two arguments against movies. First, you must collect all the material for them as you work. Second, you need to have them professionally edited.
The main area that I advise people to concentrate on for CDs is tear sheets
. If you are not in advertising, let me explain what a tear sheet is.
An advertising agency may place ads in magazines. These ads will feature a customer's product. They may use professional models. A tear sheet is simply a sheet that has been torn out of the magazine. The advertising agency will hold tear sheets to show its work. The customer will hold tear sheets to show their recent advertising. A model agency will hold tear sheets for each of its models. Some tear sheets may be framed and hung in reception.
This is an effect that you can achieve very strongly and very easily on a CD. You can have your tear sheets
as single files, or your can have them as a slide-show. For your work, the tear sheets need not literally be torn from magazines. They can be, especially if they are copies of articles by you. They can include letters of recommendation from clients, photographs of signing-off ceremonies on successful completion of assignments, or screenshots of systems you have implemented.
You can index them in whatever way you want: by date, by sector, by type.
My main advice is to avoid CDs for traditional methods of proving your expertise, and to begin building a portfolio of tear sheets that you can include on CD.
A slide-show of tear sheets can be much more compelling than a CV or a website. It is easier to build and keep current than a movie.
The opinions expressed are solely those of the author.
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