Personal email addresses

When applying for jobs online that require an email address make sure you can provide a sensible one – foxylady@hotmail.com, likeadrink@yahoo.co.uk etc are not a good idea and could have more influence on an employer’s perception of you than the contents of your CV. Keep it simple and if need be set up a new email account for job applications – it’s free and takes two minutes.

Social Networking Sites

Employers are increasingly ‘googling’ prospective employers and checking out your personal information on social networking sites such as myface, bebo and facebook. If you are portraying yourself as a hard working, diligent individual in your application but your online profile describes you as a hard living party animal that hates works then be careful – it could count against you and even mean you are not selected for interview.

It is also increasingly common that profiles that were set up whilst candidates were at school or university are no longer current or an accurate reflection of your genuine personality – keep the sites up to date, edit them or close them down.

Email Content

When applying for roles use proper grammar and full sentences. It’s very easy to use abbreviations similar to those used when texting so just be aware of the content of your emails and the spelling. If you haven’t turned on your email spell checker then do so as it is an excellent device for preventing ‘typos’.  

CVs

See CV notes for details on CV preparation, but generally keep it simple, keep it concise, no pictures, no clip art, no funny fonts, and no cliché ridden ‘personality profile’ paragraphs. Date of Birth, marital status, children etc are not relevant and unless you have genuinely interesting hobbies leave them out – walking, eating, ‘socialising with friends’ and other normal activities of daily life don’t add anything.

Always save your CV in Word (or the equivalent), don’t use Excel or save them as pdfs or other picture formats. There is no need to password protect any documents, again it’s just about keeping things simple and sensible.