Posted by CV Nation on
When you’re pursuing CEO positions, it’s vital that you equip yourself with a strong CV that communicates your leadership skills and your ability to steer organisations to success.
In this guide, we’ll show you how to prepare a powerful CEO CV that gets results in the job market. This guide also includes two great CEO CV templates that you can use now to optimise your job search.
Start your CV with a strong professional profile. Professional profiles, often referred to as personal statements or executive summaries, are short introductions at the beginning of your CV that communicate your experiences, skills and background.
Use your professional profile to illustrate your Unique Value Proposition (UVP). Your UVP is what makes you stand out from other candidates. As an example, your UVP could be related to your track record of growing businesses.
Take a look at the professional profiles in the CEO CV samples in this guide to see how the applicants highlight their UVP.
Here is an example of a CEO’s professional profile:
Progressive, forward-looking CEO with over 15 years’ experience providing strategic and operational leadership to large organisations, including Fortune 500 companies. Recent successes include growing revenue by over 221% and orchestrating the acquisition of four large companies. Passionate about building customer-oriented cultures and transforming processes to improve business performance and generate growth.
Include a skills section to highlight a small number of your strongest skills. In this section, focus on hard skills that are fundamental to your role as a CEO.
Which skills are most important for CEOs?
Key skills for CEOs include: Business management, strategic leadership, team building, strategy development, change management, business restructuring, negotiation, people management, budget management, sales, marketing.
In this section, avoid highlighting soft skills, such as organisation. Such skills don’t hold much weight unless they’re backed up with examples of times you’ve utilised the skill. As such, it’s more effective to demonstrate these skills in your CV’s career summary. This way, you can provide tangible evidence of times you have used the skills to achieve positive results.
The next step is to include your work experience. List your work experience in reverse-chronological order, starting with your most recent position and working backwards.
Start by listing your job title, followed by the company name, location and dates of employment. Then use bullet points to draw attention to your achievements.
Including achievements on your CV is a good way of making your CV stand out. They show recruiters that you’re capable of getting results.
Bolster your achievements by including numbers and metrics. Achievements that are bolstered with numbers and metrics hold more weight. Here is an example of an achievement that is bolstered with numbers:
‘Generated a $4M increase in sales of SaaS solutions by building new relationships.’
If you’ve obtained any non-executive or board experience, highlight it in this section.
If possible, highlight accomplishments and successes associated with your non-exec positions. However, it’s also acceptable to go into less detail than you did with your executive experiences. Oftentimes, simply listing the position, company/organisation and dates is sufficient.
Skip this section if you don’t have any non-executive experience.
In this section, list your qualifications and training courses. Start with your highest form of education, which for CEOs is usually a degree.
If you’re including training programmes, include only those that are relevant to your role as a CEO. For example, it would be beneficial to include leadership training. However, it would be a good idea to omit customer service training from your CV.
Here is an example of a CEO CV’s education section:
In the final section of your CV, include any additional information. Relevant additional information may be related to voluntary work, language proficiency, hobbies and interests, memberships and affiliations.
When preparing your CEO CV, ensure to optimise it for Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS). Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) are a form of recruitment software used by many HR departments to filter and rank CVs based on specific keywords and other requirements.
To ensure your CEO CV is optimised for Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS), pepper your CV with relevant keywords. To determine the most important keywords for your CEO CV, study the job description or job advert to learn about the essential requirements for the role.
Formatting also plays a role in ATS optimisation, so ensure your CEO CV is professionally formatted.
Feel free to use the CEO CV templates in this guide, which are optimised for Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS).
Executive CVs are often much longer than CVs for professionals at lower levels, often extending to multiple pages in length.
However, the optimal length for executive CVs is two or three pages. This length ensures your CV is concise and makes for a pleasant reading experience.
Include a link to your LinkedIn profile on your CV. Sending recruiters to an impressive, polished LinkedIn profile that demonstrates your value as an executive can be very beneficial when applying for jobs.
However, only include your LinkedIn URL if you have a solid, professional LinkedIn profile. Linking to a bare-bones or unprofessional LinkedIn profile can actually have negative impact on your job search.
Want to improve your LinkedIn profile? View 15 great LinkedIn headline examples. Or take a look at our 20 LinkedIn summary examples.
We hope you have found this guide to CEO CVs helpful. Feel free to use our CEO CV templates to optimise your job search.
