It’s fashionable for students and graduates to include a personal statement (otherwise known as a career aim, profile or mission statement) at the top of their CV. However, in many cases, a personal statement on a graduate CV is a waste of space. Some graduate recruiters may even find generic personal statements irritating and off-putting.
What are personal statements on CVs for?
Personal statements/career aims are intended to concisely:
- summarise a candidate’s career goals
- highlight the candidate's skills that are relevant to that career sector
- pick out key achievements – things that immediately signal to the recruiter that the candidate would excel in the sector.
These statements are best suited to more senior people already on the career ladder. The personal statement gives them the chance to be very specific about their career goal, for example to specialise further in a certain area or move to a certain type of organisation within a sector. They can also draw upon achievements gained in the workplace to further suggest their suitability for the organisation/job they’re applying to.
Why most graduates shouldn’t bother with a personal statement
By and large, graduates in their early 20s who are trying to get their ‘first proper job’ don't have the necessary range of experience or knowledge to write an impressive personal statement – a careers adviser tells us that in four years of reviewing students’ CVs, he has seen fewer than ten good statements.
Graduates’ personal statements usually sound bland – and one is very much like another’s. They tend to be full of very broad statements that don’t say anything unique about the candidate, such as: ‘I am a friendly, organised, creative English literature graduate with strong communication and teamworking skills.’ It’s amazing how many friendly, organised, creative graduates with good communication and teamworking skills there are out there. If numerous applicants list identical attributes and career goals, none of them gain an advantage from doing so.
The other problem with having profiles on graduate CVs is that the career goals are too broad. For example, we receive a lot of applications for the targetjobs editorial internships from students who want to work in ‘the media/editing/PR/marketing’. To the candidate, this may seem fair enough: they want to try out different things to make up their mind about a career. But to us, this suggests that the candidate hasn’t done enough research (otherwise they’d at least suspect that working as an editor is just that little bit different from working in PR or marketing) and that they don’t really want an internship in editorial: they’d be equally happy in our marketing department. The rest of the application will have to work hard to convince us that they really do want an internship in editorial.
The truth of the matter is that graduates should remove their personal statements and instead focus on fleshing out the other sections of their CV. For example, you could explain your final year projects, interests, or gap year experience in more detail, and this additional information could give the recruiter a clearer sense of your strengths and what motivates you.
A good covering letter does the same job as a personal statement but much, much better.
