To some degree, Executive CV Services is the product of chance and circumstances.
I’d previously worked in marketing and was the go-to person for all the copy. A contact knew that I had talent as a writer so approached me to help him with his CV business. He gave me a popular CV book and suggested I read that before tackling client work.
Some of the book’s advice made sense, but after a few chapters in before I started to notice anomalies. For example, some of the advice was contradictory. In the book, it talked about the advantages of conciseness and legibility - which tied in with sales and marketing principles that I was already familiar with. However, the book’s CV examples were quite long and cluttered. To me that was at odds with concise and legible. I looked closer at the wording in the examples and that puzzled me too. I asked my contact to pick an example at random and let me know what he thought. He skimmed through the example and said it was “good.” I pointed to the example CV’s profile section and asked what the author was trying to convey. At that point my contact (and CV business owner) scratched his head, and admitted he didn’t know!
He didn’t know because the language was somewhat contrived, and it struck as an amalgam of template entries and buzzwords rather than something that clearly told the employer what they wanted to hear. It lacked authenticity, conviction, direction, specifics, optimisation, strategy or even logic. I assessed the book’s other CV examples and told him that improving all of them wouldn’t be a problem.
I did help his clients with their CVs for a while, but even from day one, I was conscious that conventional CV advice, books and practices were flawed. So, I did things my own way.
It was no real surprise that, shortly afterwards, I set up my own company. I was far more concerned about quality, enhancements and helping clients, whereas my contact was more about quantity and money. He’s not alone. Indeed, that’s still the mantra for most CV firms today, and especially the bigger companies.
There’s an awful lot more to quality CV writing than meets the eye, and the best CV writers need creative writing talent, marketing expertise and meticulous attention to detail (which I had), but they also need the right understanding, methods and experience.
If you ask any professional CV writer if they have the right understanding, methods and experience when it comes to CV writing, then they’ll all say yes. But judging by the ‘professional’ CVs we are sent to fix on a daily basis, the evidence suggests that (sadly) they are deluded. Certainly, a lot of the professional writers who apply to work with me make lots of claims, and some even spout fantastical success rate statistics (elsewhere on this site you’ll discover what I think of statistics!). However, what they tend not to do, is pass the writing tests we give applicants. That said, I can hardly blame them, as if I’d tried my own tests when I set out on my CV writing career then I’d have struggled with it too – because at the time I didn’t have the aforementioned right understanding, methods and experience. Yes, at that time, I still improved things like CV presentation, legibility, messaging and focus - but it was nothing like the holistic radical transformations we pull off for Executive CV Services clients these days.
It was a gradual process, tweaking things, trying variations, taking to employers, gauging feedback and refining approaches, bit by bit and day-by-day, for weeks, months, years. So, it took time, but with greater understanding of the artform (yes artform), I developed special methods to sell my clients more powerfully – saying more, but in fewer words, and in alignment with sales and marketing principals.
Word got around and clients came to us from all around the world and from all sectors, many by personal recommendation.
When top career sector publishers, Pearson Education expressed an interest in publishing my CV book they had one main concern; namely that what I was saying was very different to other CV books. They liked the sound of what I was saying, but to doublecheck that what I was saying was right (and by inference what other books were saying was wrong), they asked me to improve a CV from another professional company. Using my methods, I radically transformed it, both as a whole, and on a line-by-line basis. This not only involved enhancing how it looked and read, but it also meant proactively turning the other firm’s passive and cluttered CV into a strategically optimised, and far more powerful, sales and marketing document.
With proof in the pudding unequivocally delivered, the book was duly published and our reputation further cemented.
The Executive CV Services story continues. I’m open to another team member joining myself and my longstanding talented colleagues, Sylvia and Natalie, it’s just that applicants continue to struggle to get past our tests, and I’m not one to compromise on quality. Until the right talent comes along, our small team will stay small.
Quality over quantity and customer service excellence have been at the heart of our success since day one. And we’ve never shied away from saying this, but there is something that we haven’t been vocal about - until more recently. Right from the day I read that first CV book and scratched my head, I’ve been aware that there are advisors, books, people, websites and firms in the CV sector who aren’t what they claim to be. To me, many are pretenders – pretending to know about something that in reality they know very little about. To me that’s dishonest. And the scams, gimmicks, false statistics, fake reviews and lack of honesty are a major bugbear of mine. At one point a prominent firm even ran a fake CV review site. I think this may have been pulled now, but what grates, is that in the meantime thousands of people, not just executives, directors, CEOs etc, but also those further down the career ladder, have been hoodwinked by some questionable companies into paying for services that aren’t what they’ve been led to believe. How do I know this? Well, in 20+ years I’ve received thousands of CVs of such firms from their clients. I finally wrote this article to raise awareness, and also because I am saddened each and every time a client comes to me with a failing “professional” executive CV that was supposed to guarantee interviews, but never did. As you’ll note, we now make a big thing about honesty on our homepage, as well as elsewhere on this site. I’m sure plenty will puzzle over this, scratch their heads and think it’s nonsense. It’s not, and it’s very easily proved, but the penny takes longer to drop for some. In the meantime, our focus is, and always will be, helping those who put their trust in us.
If that’s you, then we’ll be happy to help you too.
Thank you for listening.