How to Master a Solid Marketing CV

Collecting your professional achievements to display to a recruiter in the most appealing format is challenging, and can feel like a chore.

Especially when it comes to building a CV to highlight your marketing advancements – there can be far too much that seems important, or some that we might be unsure of.

According to some studies, most recruiters do not spend more than six or seven seconds observing your resume. Even though Marketing Manager is not necessarily a low-entry job, some offer positions with minimal experience if proven worthy.

This guide shall aid you in determining how to format your CV to ensure it stands out to recruiters, and best highlights your strengths. So let’s get started!

Formatting Your CV – Simplified or Detailed?

As mentioned, the recruiter observes your CV quite quickly, hence, it is important to know how to format – highlight your achievements in the most optimal way.

One company did an eye-tracking study and learned how exactly recruiters observe a resume.

With the study above, we can understand where the recruiters attempt to locate their information first. The study found, that the worst-performing resumes have common traits among them:

• Clutter: the information in the resume stretches from one end to another, with barely any space between them.

• Layout: poor layout does not segment the resume properly (it is not evident where education begins and work ends), therefore does not allow the recruiter to properly scan and search the information they are looking for.

• Keyword: as much as it is important to have some keywords in your CV to pass automated scanning, it should not be evident, that you are stuffing your resume with them.

Following that research, we can assess the important areas to start building your resume. Your CV should represent your experience, NOT your design, like in the example below, which is why deploying knowledge of smart formatting is essential to improve your CV.

When you are being recruited for a marketing position, you must convince the recruiter with your experience, that you are the one for the role.

Consider the length of your resume. Unless you have more than ten years of experience, you should manage to portray your career in one page (I know, easier said than done, but that is why we are here).

And trust me, reducing font size shall not do the trick, it might make the work of the recruiters even more difficult; keep fonts simple and classic, from size 9 to 10. Make sure it is all easily readable in six or seven seconds (skimmed, rather than read, but you get the point).

Clear sections in your resume shall help recruiters quickly identify what they are looking for, be it a career or education. But opinions diverge here – what are the most important sections to have in your CV?

Even though it depends on the vacancy you are applying for, here are some most agree on, and some I have been doing for my own CV or have seen work best during the recruitment of a team:

Need help with your marketing CV? Book a mentor session with Andriy Zapisotskyi!

Building your CV – Sections to Include

Sections are what perfect your CV. They create visual and textual structure, which allows the recruiters to quickly scan your resume for the information they are searching for. Despite the rise of AI resume generators, I recommend you do everything independently.

Basic Information

Add your name, contact information (phone number and email), and address.

A 1-2 sentence pitch of yourself as a professional might be a great addition too. This information should be relevant and targeted to a specific vacancy. If you're applying for similar marketing positions, better to change the messaging for each one.

Some add links to their websites or portfolios, like LinkedIn or GitHub.

Do you need to add them? Not essentially. If your CV exhibits your skills properly, sites can simply be an addition. Decide on that whether the space in the CV allows you.

But anyway, don’t add too many links. Imagine a physical interview in the office and a recruiter prints your CV – how will they click those 4 links to your socials & websites that you've put in the top right corner?! :D If they will have a need – they will find you and check all the info beforehand :)

The priority in your CV should be cleanliness. You could consider adding your own picture, yet that strictly is dependent on you; if you decide to include the picture, you must ensure it is a professional one, where you are properly visible without any filters or excessive expressions. 

In general, it is not necessary to include a picture on a resume, and in some cases, it may be best to avoid doing so. If you are applying for a job in the USA, don’t include your picture. They have strict non-discrimination policies.
– Zoriana Kachmar, Talent Acquisition Specialist

Education

The list of where you had your education should begin with your most recent ones. In that section, you can also add any academic achievements, like certification, or scholarship. 

In this section, you can also list your activities; like organizing a workshop or an event, assisting teachers or lectors, or anything that can highlight your experience in the field. Here, you can also add your GPA; however, if you do not have an impressive GPA, avoid adding it, as it is not something recruiters shall be looking for.

Work Experience

Similar to education, begin adding your most recent companies. If the company is not too famous for its service – add brief descriptions (1 short sentence at best). Include the title of your positions and dates – this shows progression.

This section has the most important objective. Here, you must list all of your accomplishments for each role. Let us take a minute to review how to do that:

Need help with your marketing CV? Book a mentor session with Andriy Zapisotskyi!

How to list your achievements in your resume

1. Describe your experience in one or two lines; more would be excessive.

2. Instead of describing your role – describe your achievements.

3. List the impact your achievements had with measurements.

4. Additional Experience: aside from working, we also do volunteering.

I, personally, have plenty of volunteering work that I take pride in, but it is important to know which to add and which to remove. If you see any of your past experiences no longer highlighting your strengths as well as your recent ones – delete them. This creates more space and allows the focus on those points in the CV that matter.

You also should customize your CV depending on which experiences are more applicable to the vacancy you are applying for; in our case – it is marketing. Have you done any work in the field of service? That probably does not give you more credit, than your experience as a marketing intern, which you passed successfully. 

In this field, you also can add any interests and skills you might have, alongside certifications, and the languages you speak. This section helps the recruiter understand who you are and what you do beyond your professional experience. But it is also important to know exactly how to formulate your sentences when listing your experiences or achievements.

Begin your sentence with a past tense, add any initiatives you might have had in your past experience, and add a measurement to it. This could be about increasing revenue, reducing cost, amplifying customer satisfaction, or improving performance. These could be anything, as long as the benefit of your initiative is visible and measurable.

For example, instead of saying “developed customer website automation”, you could say “developed an engineering and marketing initiative to automate customer registration process, reducing processing time by 60%”.

Here the verb begins in the past tense, then follows with the initiative and how you implemented it, and results with measured success.

This is purely an example but does give you an idea of how to transform a regular job description into an achievement that can aid your CV to be more impactful for the recruiter.

Some people also add headlines, summaries, or objectives in their CV, is that a good idea?

It is recommended to avoid doing that since if the CV is built properly, they would not give any essential information to the recruiter during the first six seconds of their observation, and they take space, that could be used to add more accomplishments. It is better to focus on keywords, phrases, and accomplishments, and how to formulate them all, which leads us to our following segment.

It’s important to incorporate keywords that are exactly as they are displayed in a job description or listing in your resume. This way, it will be much more likely to pass ATS checks and reach human representatives. Those representatives can then really look over the resume you spent tons of time crafting and curating.
– Gergo Vari,  HR Tech Entreprenuer & Lensa Founder

Even though not all marketing jobs are equal, they do share a lot in common; and as we learned how to build a strong CV, let us focus on the detail and see what skills are generally considered best for marketers.

Creativity

Companies in their hiring process of marketers require people who can exhibit traits of creativity to find new ideas and boost their strategies. List your achievements that present the recruiter with your creative skills.

Those achievements could be developing creative concepts for social media campaigns or developing creative advertising for a service. Make sure to add results to these achievements, like “generated over a thousand impressions” or something applicable to your results.

Leadership

A lot of companies lead cross-functional or agency teams, and having leadership experience is definitely beneficial in that regard. Here, we can write “lead a cross-functional team to develop three new products” or “created own marketing messaging framework”.

Analytics

As a marketer, companies expect you to read data, formulate recommendations, and build strategies according to them. A good point here would sound like “analyzed data of Feature X and reduced production cost by $50.000”.

Strategies

Or better to say – strategic thinking and production of strategies. This answers the questions if you can define an objective, identify options to achieve that objective and select the most effective option to accomplish the goal. The suitable point here would state “developed distribution strategy, that resulted in an 8% increase of the revenue”.

Communication

It is not something exclusive to marketing but is nonetheless important. But marketers often require to impress the audience at the conference or customers with presentations, which require good communication and persuasion skills. A point here highlighting that would state “featured as a general session speaker at four national sales meetings”.

Want to know what exact skills to highlight in your resume? Do read my other article on marketing skills that will help you become a senior-level specialist.

Does Grammar Matter in a Resume?

Most might consider this evidence, but you might be surprised, that around 58% of people have grammar mistakes in their CVs.

In many ways, your resume makes the first impression about you, and you better make it as best as possible. Double-check all your wording, spelling, and even punctuation, which might seem like a small detail – but those details matter.

Though there are plenty of paid grammar checkers available, you should start with free grammar-check tools, such as Grammarly or Hemingway. This is because free grammar checkers are usually enough to find and correct spelling and grammar errors and you should avoid paying for tools when you really don’t have to.

Most of the time, you will have to submit your resume to the employer's portal or choose email submission, so make sure it is error-free. Once you send your resume with mistakes, they are gone. On the other hand, you may consider dropping off your CV if you really want to amaze the recruiting manager. In this situation, utilize a signature generator before printing to include your contact details. You don't want to just leave your resume where it is with no way for others to get in touch with you. If you opt for this approach, know that this is a great move if you are searching for an entry-level marketing role (people always love to see proactive people) and you want to show initiative.

Conclusion

With an understanding of how to build a strong CV that highlights your strengths and the five most important skills to include as a marketer – you have all the necessary information to confidently apply to a desired vacancy. It is important to have your CV targeted for a desired vacancy. Instead of piling all of your skills into a few papers, have a few resumes for different positions.

However, having a strong CV is not sufficient to acquire a job, there is also a matter of a cover letter, or a self-presentation video, that helps you stand out, and interview behavior, which comes with their own challenges, but guarantees your candidature to the recruiter. Create a timeline to help you create a CV that stands out, utilizing the necessary resources.

Connect with me on Linkedin and let me know what you think about this article.

Till next time! :)