Summer is here, and so is the internship season. Furthermore, placements must be ongoing, and students must be busy refining and crafting their CVs for internships and jobs.
A CV is an important document that allows you to show a prospective employer the best of what you’ve got. It sells your skills and experience and shows them you’re the right person for the job.
Making a good impression is important in today’s competitive job market. Your CV will be your first contact with employers, so it’s essential to get it right.
Your CV should look neat and professional. While a law student’s CV is not expected to be flamboyant or artistic, it should look good and be readable.
Here’s how to do it:
- Your CV should be a maximum of 2 pages long (unless otherwise stated).
Firstly, let me tell you why.
- Recruiters have very little time. Their inboxes are flooded with CVs and other Human Relations (HR) issues. Recruiters have very little time for interns. They do not have the time to go through four pages of dense text containing the achievements of an unknown person. Most CVs have ten seconds to make a point. If your CV passes the 10-second test, it goes through another 20-30-second reading. The decision is then taken.
- A two-page CV forces you to mention your best achievements. It is not a bulleted biography where you mention everything you’ve done in your life. Your CV should have only the relevant details written in precise detail.
Note: You do not convert a 4-page CV into a 2-page CV by changing the font size from 12 to 8 and lessening the line space. You do that by mentioning the best 3-4 conferences out of the 10 you have done, and so on. Also, if your CV struggles to fill in 2 pages at the end of your second year (2 pages worth of achievements), you must put in more effort.
- Writing about your achievements
In your CV, you’ll mention your courses, seminars, paper publications, internships (let’s call them ‘achievements’), etc. I’ve said earlier that you should mention them in precise detail. Let me explain:
Some students write too little about their achievements. They’ll write: Attended a Seminar on Human Rights. The person reading your CV is puzzled.
Some students go on and on with their words. On 20 December 2014, I attended a Seminar titled “Human Rights: International and National Perspectives in the 21st Century” as a participant and a speaker. The seminar was a three-day event conducted by ANLU Law College, Delhi, in association with UGC, during which we learned much about Human Rights. This is 40 words and doesn’t say much.
Here’s how you write in precise detail: Presented a paper on ‘Do Animals too have ‘Human Rights’ at a 3-day UGC-sponsored seminar held at NUJS, Delhi, on December 20, 2014.
- Put some context into your achievements.
Putting context and meaning to your achievements is important. For example, if you’re the Convenor of your Moot Court Society, that’s a good thing and should find its way in your CV. But you can make it better and add a sentence, like Responsibilities include conducting and managing logistics of moot courts held in our college; liaisoning with various law firms and companies regarding sponsorship and knowledge tie-ups; selecting and training intra-college moot court teams. This shows you can be trusted to manage events, work in a team, etc.
- Mentioning your internships.
Under the internships subheading of your CV, mention the name of the lawyer/law firm/organisation first, followed by the city where the office is located, and then the duration of the internship. For example:
Luthra and Luthra Law Offices, New Delhi, June 1-30, 2014
You should then mention the work done in your internship in 2-4 bullet points. The bullet points put together should ideally convey that you have learned various skill sets and/or worked on different areas of law. If it was an internship in a niche law firm, the tasks in that specialised area of law you did should be highlighted.
- Your CV should be visually appealing.
Overall, your CV should be neat and professional. Think of the products you buy from the market. If they aren’t visually appealing, you don’t buy them. Your CV should say: Read Me! It should make that reading easy, too. If you are not a good judge of such aesthetic things, please get another set of eyes (maybe a trustworthy senior) to review it. Please do not put art into your CV; you are not in a design school.
- Format and Font.
It is advisable to use one font for all of your CVs. Similarly, maintain uniformity with your headings. For example, if the heading ‘Academic Credentials’ is in small caps, ensure that the rest of the headings (say ‘Internships’, ‘Courses’, etc.) are all in small caps, too.
Line spacing should be such that the text in your CV doesn’t look cramped for space, nor should your CV look spaced out. Also, ensure there are no incomplete sentences or paragraphs that jut out.
| Note: While you may refer to model CVs available online to know what good formatting looks like, do not copy from a popular source. Your CV should look original and not a copy-paste job. However, if your college follows a particular format, stick to it while in college. |
- Aim, objectives, and mission statement.
Many students mention verbose ‘mission statements’ in their CVs, using complex words and lengthy sentences and, by the end of it all, not making any sense. Please avoid the use of such unnecessary things. Most recruiters do not have the time to go through your mission statement. If you mention mission statements and the like, please write something simple and elegant. If you want to take a chance, you can be creative here, which might make the recruiter sit up and take notice of you and your CV.
- Highlighting things in your CV.
There might be a few words you wish to highlight in your CV. Putting the text in bold or italicising it is a good way to do that. Again, this highlighting should be done uniformly. Make sure it’s good on the eye.
- Use of abbreviations.
You can use abbreviations in your CV, provided they are commonly known. For example, using SEBI for the Securities and Exchange Board of India or BCI for the Bar Council of India is fine. Don’t use anything you think a reasonable man/woman must guess second.
- Contact details in your CV.
The email ID and phone number you mention in your CV should be what you regularly use. Feel free to mention both if you use two email IDs or two phone numbers.
- Run a spell check.
If your CV has a misspelt word, it will leave a bad impression on any legal employer. Lawyers pride themselves on the use of flawless language. A misspelt word in a legal document can be a lethal mistake. A typo is not expected in today’s sophisticated spell checks.
- Format of the file.
Please send your CVs in .doc or .pdf format. Please don’t use fancy formats or send online links to your CVs. While some recruiters may sympathise with the open-source software movement, not everyone will have the same software and won’t care to open your CV again.
- Making your CV ATS friendly.
ATS stands for applicant tracking system. Big companies use ATS software to track many applications that might come to them. To make your CV an ATS friend, ensure that it includes keywords that occur in the job description as much as feasible.
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