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Your other CV By Steve Flinders
While French students demonstrate in Paris to maintain the bureaucratic and over-regulated system that stops them from getting jobs (unemployment in France is over ten per cent; the labour code is longer than the Bible), an old American friend of mine in Paris is now volunteering to help unemployed people write their CVs. He tells his clients not to go over one side of paper, and tries to find out what really makes them different from everyone else. Since this is rarely evident in a conventional CV, he asks them what other jobs they’ve done and what they learnt from these. He says that people then often reveal qualities of leadership, courage and initiative that are completely absent from their official CVs. This chimes with my own experience as a recruiter. During one memorable job interview we discovered that our candidate wrote poetry. Asked to recite something of his, we were treated to a spellbinding performance and gave him the job without further ado. In another, I learnt that my applicant liked reading philosophy. Asked to explain a problem I didn’t understand, he did so with a clarity that revealed another special talent. I never regretted either appointment. 68 | Issue 89 | June 2016
My American friend’s advice led me to think about my own alternative CV and I ended up with a list of around 20 other jobs, including newspaper boy, baby sitter, car cleaner, postal worker, betting shop assistant, migrant and ex-offender literacy teacher, removals man, waiter, fisherman, farm worker, construction worker, tea trolley assistant and book cataloguer. The activity made me think about what I had learnt from these experiences, including the awful and em-
barrassing mistakes I learnt from. I am going to try to put my real story into a one-page, cliché-free CV. You might find it an interesting exercise too.
Steve Flinders is a freelance trainer, writer and coach, based in Malta, who helps people develop their communication and leadership skills for working internationally: steveflind@aol.com.