Your CV (aka resume) is ready and you’re about to send it out to recruitment agencies and potential employers.

Whether it’s your first job or a strategic career move, there are some things you need to do before you send off that CV.

1) Is Your Email Address Helping or Hindering?

First impressions count. So make sure your email address does not present a distorted image of you.

• Your fun email address such as “hotlover4u@…” may not strike an interviewers funny bone.
• Shared email addresses such as “tomandlinda@…” create uncertainty as to who will be reading or replying to an email. If you share your email address with your family or partner, consider setting up your own address to avoid accidental deletion of an interview confirmation and to give yourself some privacy.
• Take care over hyphens in your email. It is easy for someone in a rush to confuse a hyphen with an underscore.
• Although it’s not your fault, people can also read .com instead of .co.uk. Grab both versions of an email address if you can or choose the more easily remembered .com even that means registering your own domain.

It is worth the time to take the time to set up an email address that you can use for job applications and other activities where you want to present a good image.  Choose an email address that contains your name or an abbreviation of your name. Set your email up so that your full name appears in the “From” field.

2) Future-Proof your Contact Details

Once your CV is out there, it can remain accessible to others for quite a while. An agency may want to head-hunt you in a year or so. Or an interviewer who rejected you may remember you as the perfect candidate for a position that suddenly opens up.

Therefore, your CV should list your personal email address and a personal mobile number as the primary ways to contact you. If you need to apply with your current work email address or work telephone, list these separately.

3) Check Your Online Footprint

In the current wave of social networking, it’s quite possible that there may be things about you online that you would rather prospective employers did not see. Search for your name online and see what can be found about you. The internet gives everybody the opportunity to play papparazzi so be inventive, become your own stalker and search for your email address and anything else that an agency or potential employer might try.

If you find something that needs changing, then change it. Remember that search engines can take around a month to reflect changes so do this in good time. If you do not have the rights to change it (a comment on a blog or a news article perhaps), then plan how you will respond if the subject is mentioned.

Check your profile on facebook, MySpace and any other social networking site you visit. Even if you have nothing to hide, set secure privacy options. At this early stage of your job search, you want to minimise the risk that a prospective employer may take offence at something trivial on your personal profile. Hide your friends list from casual observers and remove your tags from photos that your friends may have posted. You can always set them up again once you have secured your job.

If you have a profile on LinkedIn, ask current colleagues to write recommendations. Give people something positive to find.

4) Set a Correct Target

Your CV should be tailored to the position you are applying for. It is common and quite normal to have several versions of a CV that place emphasis on different areas. A good recruitment agent will work with you to suggest ways to customise your CV for a specific role. You will have to do the work yourself, but do ask them for help and suggestions.

Some of the less ethical recruitment agencies will not be as helpful, especially if you are applying for your first job or for a role that pays them low commission. Don’t let this put you off and don’t become agitated or rude. You need them to put your CV forward so present the best side of yourself in all your communications with them.

Recent surveys suggest that up to 73% of employers reject CV’s that do not list work related achievements. Maximise your application by making sure that your achievements are relevant to the position you are applying for.

5) Check Your Holidays!

Some people apply for jobs or submit their CV’s to online job-boards just before they leave to go on holiday. Sometimes it’s a calculated risk where the assumption is that you will be back before anybody responds to your application. However, the other side is that you are not contactable and if anyone does try to contact you, they will doubt that you are serious about your job search and they may not try to get in touch again.

If you do need to submit an application just before a holiday, then mention this in your cover letter as a courtesy – but remember that they are a stranger so do not suggest that the house will be empty for two weeks.

A client described a sore spot in her soul; the result of the way someone treated her. She’s found that anger makes the pain easier to bear – although she admits that this is probably not the best strategy in the world!

Sore spots worry me – I worry that sore spots in our soul create trouble further on down the line with regards to our health and well-being.

Last week, my Dad observed that our natural state is Peace. He says the evidence for this lies between the moment after we first wake up and the moment before our thoughts start reminding us of disturbances from the people and events around us.

These disturbances  affect our state of mind and distort our ability to prevent them from morphing into “sore spots in the soul”.  One way to develop a stronger resistance to disurbance is through cultivating an attitude of forgiveness.

Now in case you’re about to run a mile, I’m not suggesting that you throw away your worldly goods and go around blessing your enemies (although can you imagine their reaction if you did!).

I’m defining forgiveness as the ability to stop disturbance finding a home in your soul.

Developing the following habits helps cultivate this ability:

Reconcile Your Mind Chatter (”Noise”)

Forgiveness lives in your body under all the “noise”. You get to it through a psychological process of self-reconciliation.

Although forgiveness is divine, there’s not much divinity going on inside us when we are hurting. We can’t pretend we don’t mind when actually we do mind deeply. We weren’t the ones that asked for such betrayal or behaved so insensitively, so why in the world should it be up to us to undo the damage that was caused? Don’t our feelings count? Where’s the justice?

The Process of forgiveness (it is a process, not simply a single thought or act) needs us to see what is hurting inside us. Perhaps re-evaluate our values. It asks us to re-examine our priorities – but in this there is a danger that our views might change. That we’ll be letting the other person “win”. And they don’t deserve to win because they wronged us! There is a danger that we might actually feel forgiveness, and if that happens, how can we have what we really want – proof that we matter?

These conflicts can be brutal and the “noise” gives the illusion they are unchangeable. Perhaps this is why some people hold on to anger, turning a normal short-term reaction into something long-term and insidious.

Being open to questioning your own attitudes, thoughts and reactions helps create a mindset that grows to challenge this internal conflict.

Refuse to Blame

Nurturing anger and blame is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.

Anger and blame keeps us reliving the experience so we stay attached to pain and the hurt. It clouds our vision and perpetually reminds us that we have reason to be this unhappy. We get used to being in emotional pain. It turns us into martyrs.

When you find yourself blaming someone else, try consciously refusing to finish that sentence or thought. Let it remain unformed and with practice, your mind will move onto other things. It’s not about denial. It’s about not torturing yourself.

Remember that refusing to blame is not the same as accepting what happened. When you refuse to blame, you give your own wisdom a chance to help you.

It’s only when we stop filling our mind with blame and accusations that we can make space for new thoughts to enter. Forgiveness and self-reconciliation need this space in your head to flourish.

Ask Yourself: Who will you be afterwards?

Forgiving someone changes the way you see them. It also changes you.

Fear of the “consequences” of forgiveness can make us hesitant to forgive.

• “People will disapprove”
• “I’ll lose face by taking the first step”
• “It’ll be like how it was before”

The fears provide an opportunity to examine your reaction. For example, if you think you’ll lose face, is there a history of let-downs with this person? Is there actually a different event that you need to forgive before you can forgive them for this one?

The process you go through in order to reconcile the fears changes your self perception. A part of you strengthens. Some things no longer matter while others become more important. You change in the perception of others. One person thinks your decision to forgive is crazy while someone else thinks you’re “well cool”.  How much will you be influenced by (and directed by) other people in this matter? How comfortable are you in the role of someone who has forgiven?

Sometimes you can only forgive in private, silently and secretly because the other person is not a physical part of your life anymore. Nobody knows what pain you were in nor the relief you feel now. It’s a big transition – who are you now that you’re not feeling the pain?

Forgiveness is perceived as something you have to do for the other person. I think it’s something you do for yourself.

You know that you have forgiven when you feel the peace in your body, when your language does not contain blame and when you no longer bring up the incident in future arguments.

These are just three mindsets that help cultivate the ability to stop disturbance finding a home in your soul. Do you have any others? To put the question another way, what obstacles do you find standing in the way of forgiveness?

Related article at ReetaLuthra.com: Forgiving Your Way to Personal Development and Better Health

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Photo credit: ngould
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