How to write your Fintech CV.

Why it’s still important to have a well crafted CV.

A well written and formatted CV demonstrates you understand and can articulate your profession.

It shows you can succinctly explain technical subject matter and complex processes.

It provides good talking points in an interview, allows the interviewer to ask follow-up questions and offers a platform to discuss previous roles in more detail.

A good CV is the difference between a potential employer wanting to meet you or wanting to meet your competitor.

What to Include in Your CV.

Your CV should be a complete record of your career and include as many industry-based achievements as possible.

For each role held, we recommend including 5-10 detailed points about the role and suggest it takes the following format:

  1. A broad statement

  2. An expanded statement outlining your responsibilities

  3. A quantifiable statement

  4. A statement highlighting any results or outcomes

Each of these four points should be written as one CV bullet point.

Here is an example:

Broad statement
Worked with institutional clients to develop their payments capabilities.

Expanded statement
This involved selling the Company's payments products to C-level executives including payment terminals, gateway services and fraud monitoring products.

Quantified statement
My team and I were able to exceed our $1 million revenue target by 20% and improved our Net Promoter Score by 10%.

Results statement
Our customers reported greater business efficiencies with in-store payments and reduced online transaction fraud by 30%.

It's important to show the link with a generic responsibilities statement (a statement everyone has on their CV such as; attended client meetings to win new business) to a contextual results statement > a result that is unique to you and the role you performed at that company.

By writing your CV this way, you allow the reader a greater sense of your professional experience and personal traits. It also better prepares you for an interview. You have previously written down the steps in each of your achievements allowing you to further expand on each point in a face-to-face meeting.

CV Do's & Don’ts.

Do:

  • Have someone proofread your CV.

  • Use industry specific words like merchant acquiring, EMV, NPP, fraud, cards and payments (recruitment databases can find your CV and rank it highly in searches).

  • Swap generic statements for contextual statements.

  • Use a clear and easy-to-read, text-based layout.

  • Provide a brief description of companies on your CV, even if well known.

  • Keep consistency around font, font size and headings.

  • Be specific on dates - Jan 2012 to Dec 2017 vs 2012 to 2017.

Don’t:

  • Embellish your CV (I’m the best sales person in Sydney) or talk in clichés (I’m a great team player).

  • Make statements you can’t quantify (delivered NPP project for my company) a project of this size needs detail.

  • Use colours, graphics, logos or images.

  • Name the file after the role you are pursuing (BDM Role for Commonwealth Bank version 13).

  • Have multiple versions of your CV in the market. One well written CV should suffice.