1. Use good paper.

The cheap reams of thin paper that you normally feed into your inkjet printer are not suitable for a CV (Curriculum Vitae, Latin for "course of life") or résumé (as a CV is often called in North America). Your CV should convey quality, and this starts with paper that conveys at first glance and touch that YOU are a quality person. Go to your nearby stationery or office supply store, and look at the most expensive paper they have. Look at the cotton, linen and resume bond papers that are available from quality manufacturers. Not quite cheap but well worth it. It's a great expense for a company to hire someone new, so isn't it reasonable for you to go to some expense to present yourself for a job?

2. Look at the employer's point of view.

The way to start thinking about your CV or résumé, is that it is not an item of expression for your own benefit, but a document designed to communicate and sell yourself to someone else. What is important is not what you want to talk about; what is important is what your prospective employer needs to hear and wants to hear about you. So don't approach your CV as if you were writing in your diary or chatting with a job counselor. Think of your potential boss, trying to hire for the very position that you are seeking. What kind of CV would YOU want to see, if you were in her or his shoes? That is the kind of CV you need to write.

3. Beware what you 'bold'.

One of the most glaring errors in the common self-produced resume is what is placed in bold and what is not. Typesetting emphasis, whether it be bold print, italics, underlining, or a larger font, is used to draw the eye, and if you look through a stack of CV's you find all sorts of different things are emphasized. In one CV it is the section headings, in the next it is the company names, in the next it is the dates employed, and so on. With your own draft of a CV, you need to look at where the eye is drawn by the emphasis that is marked into the text. Is it the truly important stuff in bold, or is the text in bold just a distraction from what is really essential to a prospective employer?

4. Structure the text!

A CV is an art form, and the blank piece of paper is a canvas. The elements need to be arranged on paper in a form that is logical, pleasing to the eye, and presents you in your best light. The information is not just something to casually toss together, in some format that you vaguely remember from high school. In particular, what you are looking for in a CV is a balance: a balance of information and format, of style and substance, of the necessary and the important. What can be especially helpful is a balance between items in a list and very short narrative, sentences that describe or illuminate your skills and accomplishments.

5. Make your objective specific or don't mention it.

Very often the top section of a resume includes a statement of what you are looking for, but this statement is often way too vague! You should avoid doing this if your job objective is not specific to the position for which you are applying. Your willingness to take any higher paying job in a more stable company is a fine idea for your private thoughts, but there's no need to make this kind of broad general statement at the top of a resume. If you sound too vague and unfocused, a prospective employer will pass you by for someone who sounds more interested in the specific position that is available.

6. Quantify!

People love numbers in the modern world, and if you have some kind of numbers, any numbers, to describe your past accomplishments and responsibilities, you should use them. Did you supervise a quarter million dollar budget? Sell a half million dollars worth of a product? Supervise 14 employees? Increase the efficiency of your area by 30 percent? Save the company 50,000 dollars or euros? People love this kind of stuff, and hang their hat on it. Think hard, and chances are you can come up with some numbers, even if only approximate ones, to describe what you've done and how well you've done it.

7. Accomplishments not activities.

The human mind is a funny thing, and what you focus on about yourself, is not what other people look at, and certainly not what is important to put in a CV. When you think of a job, you tend to think about how you spend your day and how much you enjoy it: Is it easy? Hard? Boring? Fascinating? In your own mind, you tend to describe a past job by what you spent most of the time doing. But maybe this is not important. It is not helpful to say, "Most of my time was just spent shuffling paper." Revise your thinking so that you can look at each past job, school experience, or volunteer effort as a series of major and minor accomplishments. The biggest ones of these should go on a resume, not just as an afterthought, but as the way the whole experience is described.

8. Accentuate the positive.

It's a cliché, but never more vividly important than in writing a CV or résumé. Everyone's life is an imperfection, but a CV is not the place to give a full-spectrum view of yourself as a human being, as if it were some sort of historical biography. Imperfection is assumed. A CV should be your best side forward. If you admit negatives on this document, it will raise questions of whether there may be something really awful going on, because you feel compelled to admit some failing in a resume. There's no point to lying or inventing phony stories to cover up for something, but if something is negative, it just needs to be left out. Your CV should be built entirely of positive building blocks.

9. Use a resume consultant.

No one should do a start-from-scratch CV or résumé alone. This is a project that needs a second head to work on it with you. At the very least, have a trusted friend look at your CV, hopefully a friend who has some business sense and is not afraid to tell you if you are being foolish or selling yourself short. The wisest route is to use a professional writing service like International CV and Résumé or other fine services. For more on Why Use a Professional CV - Résumé Writing Service, click here.