Formatting your Monster CV
Creating and designing a CV for the web is very different than preparing one to print out and send off to potential employers. Due to the now common distribution method of uploading your CV to websites like Monster, the best way to make sure your information is read in the way you intended is to keep the layout clean and simple so it can be read by the various browsers and email systems that people use.
Here’s a very quick overview of how the process works
1. You upload your Microsoft Word document to Monster
2. If you have made it Public, employers will be able to find your details
3. Your information will be sent to relevant employers
4. They will contact you if you have the skills to fill their vacancies
There are a few stages in that route where a CV that isn’t formatted correctly could let you down.
Firstly, as soon as you upload your Word CV, the Monster system reformats it in a way that will work across various mediums. We try to cover all the bases so often have to strip out some of the more complicated things so your CV is readable in every possible situation.
That means that any fancy fonts, funky characters, headers and footers or meticulously created alignments may be lost and your CV may look completely different than intended
Many employers elect to receive email in a plain text format which will bypass strict email filters at their company. If we weren’t to put every CV through this cleansing process, the number of candidates being matched to employers would drop dramatically as their spam filters blocked genuine applications.
The good news is that we have various templates available to help make sure your document works effectively. The ‘classic’ versions of our job based, skill based and combo CV templates are all ideally formatted to work with our CV upload tool, so all you need to do is download them and copy in your details.
There are still ways to make sure your CV stands out from the crowd and to provide employers will a beautifully designed document. Using one of the many free web based file storage tools (such as Google Docs), you can host your CV online and then point employers to it. Simply put the link to your document in the ‘Website’ field in the 'Contact Info' section in My Monster, or alternatively provide the link directly within your uploaded CV.
