Is your CV interactive? Keeping your resume alive and relevant with hyperlinks

Your CV can take on a whole extra dimension – and can make things easier and more impressive for recruiters – if you add hyperlinks to show examples of your work experience…

Back in 2009 I volunteered to help promote a Twestival in Jerusalem, where I was living at the time. Due to the social-media-cutting-edge-communications nature of the event it was agreed that we would use all the latest promotional innovations, which at the time included a social media release.

Now, at first I was intimidated by this concept, but for the purposes of promoting the event, it turned out to be little more than a media release with hyperlinks, including links to the Twitter ID of all the volunteers, sponsors and other notables, as well as a few other relevant social media links. (Social media releases often also contain embedded videos or such like, but we didn’t have any of that sort of material to hand.)

This work got me thinking that my CV should really be more interactive, and so, over-time, I have worked to ensure that it is more like an eCV than a straight forward paper version.

This conclusion has since been reinforced by discussions with recruiters and from reading CV and application requirements for more online-focused jobs.

As one recruiter explained recently, if you make a claim about something on your CV, you need to be able to back it up with examples via links from the page. These links could mean the difference between you making it to interview stage or not.

So how do we go about making our CV into an eCV?

It is simple enough and you have probably already worked it out (if you don’t already have it in place). But in case you need a little bit of guidance…

1. Insert hyperlinks for all the companies where you have worked (going back to real basics, this means that in MS Word, you highlight the area you want to create a link for, click on ‘Insert’ and then ‘Hyperlink” and then add the URL for the company)
2. Link as many projects/achievements etc to online examples as you can. For example, if you have media releases, publications or websites, link them in to where you have listed them.
3. Make sure all your social media IDs are included with hyperlinks.

This is an ongoing process. Only a couple of days ago I visited my CV to update the hyperlinks and make sure everything that could be linked was linked. I am already thinking of a few more things I need to go back to update.

Hope this helps!

Marjorie Solomon is the founder and editor of Talking Comms Jobs. She has 15 years communications experience and is probably still a job seeker. 

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Tags: australia, communications jobs, CV, cv with links, eCV, hyperlinks, interactive cv, jobs, jobs search, links, social media release