Told by a Teen / Female Founder Stories
Own Your Story: Beyond the CV with Vizzy
“Most CVs tell the story of what you’ve done, not who you are.”
Jess Woodward-Jones, Vizzy
The conversation
Jess Woodward-Jones left theatre marketing to build Vizzy, which is trying to fix the part of applying for jobs that has stopped working.
140 applications per role
That is the figure she gave me for graduate roles at the moment. Which explains why applying feels the way it does, and why doing more of them is not the answer.
Her advice was to spend better time on fewer applications, to the jobs you genuinely want.
What a profile actually shows
A Vizzy profile is meant to carry the things a CV cannot. She described it as showing the business you’ve taken the initiative to create, or whatever your equivalent of that is. It is free for every candidate, which I asked about because I had assumed it would not be.
Sunday night
Her answer to the success question is the one I have quoted most since. What defines success for her is getting to Sunday night and not being afraid of Monday morning.
It depends what you want out of life and what you define as success. That is hers.
What I took from it
Your job should not be a chore.
Your job shouldn’t be a chore.
That sounds obvious and I don’t think it is, because everything about how we pick subjects and courses is about what leads somewhere rather than what you’d actually want to do on a Monday.
Jess said success is getting to Sunday night and not dreading the morning. That’s the version I want.
