Book Review: The New Economics by W. Edwards Deming

This great little book acts as an introduction and summary to Deming's ideas:

• his 'system of profound knowledge'


• the purpose of management


• removal of numeric targets and incentives


• the Shewhart Cycle for learning and improvement


• Variation


• the Red Bead Game


• control charts

A highly recommended read because ....

( amazon.co.uk | amazon.com )

The best book on writing a CV: Pitch Yourself by Bill and Michael Faust(Book Review)

I promise, I shall make this my last post on CVs and recruitment for a while. (see notes, and more notes)

But I just wanted to mention the only useful book I read about CVs when researching the CV book market. When I read this book I gave up on writing a CV book because it pretty much covered the notes I had made (previous 2 blog posts) and gave useful information for building up an effective CV.

Pitch Yourself, by Bill Faust and Michael Faust.

( amazon.co.uk | amazon.com )

The basic summary: You have less than 30 seconds to impress. You're CV needs to answer the question "What can you offer me?". CV needs to provide evidence, create interest. Make your next employer buy you.

More notes on writing a CV that a hiring manager wants to read

So the last post described what I wanted.

Now some tips about how I read a CV. So make sure you write your CV to support my reading of it.

Contrary to some advice - I don't really mind how many pages the CV has. I care about the relevancy of the information and that it demonstrates to me what you will bring to the role.

I have a multi-pass approach to CVs:

• pass one: Is this CV even worth reading?


• pass two: Who is this person?


• pass three: Could they meet my needs?


• pass four: Are they lying?


• pass five: Do I want to speak to them?

How to write a CV that a hiring manager wants to read

This post started as notes for a book. "What would be better?" I thought "In this time of recession, than to prey on peoples fears of losing their job and write a book on how to write a CV." And then I did the research and read through about 15 books on how to write a CV and I could barely keep them apart. They all follow the same formula and cover the same stuff. So instead of adding to the dung heap category of 'how to write a CV' I thought I'd pull together my thoughts and explain what I look for in a CV. Hopefully other managers looking for this stuff as well.

First some don'ts - so if your CV does any of these... stop it, now, edit it, fix it: