My company also advertised recently and I was a little baffled by the standard of CVs. I would have expectedTech Writer CVs to be about the best CVs out there. Nope. Common flaws included: poor and inconsistent sentence structure, poor layout, no summary of skills, no addressing the job's specific requirements, typos(!) inconsistent punctuation (hyphenation) and spelling. For me, the most disappointing aspect was the poor layout and design that made it hard to extract the critical information quickly, and betrayed a lack of user focus. Although that said, it's the first time I've had to peruse many CVs at once and I know I'll write a better CV myself having had this experience. Actually we were tolerant of some of the typo issues, because I know CVs can be prepared in a rush for legitimate reasons. But probably only 10-20% off the CVs I saw even used Word styles properly. Most of them had two or three styles and one hellavalotta manual formatting. (am I being overly judgmental on this issue?) For what it's worth, I think outside interests should be included discreetly at the back of the CV. For me, if I've read all the way to the back of the CV, then I'm usually interested, and would like to get a sense of who the applicant is, outside their professional domain. Al Forge ************************************************** To post a message to austechwriter, send the message to austechwriter@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx To subscribe to austechwriter, send a message to austechwriter-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with "subscribe" in the Subject field. To unsubscribe, send a message to austechwriter-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with "unsubscribe" in the Subject field. To search the austechwriter archives, go to www.freelist.org/archives/austechwriter To contact the list administrator, send a message to austechwriter-admins@xxxxxxxxxxxxx **************************************************