Put it in the order people expect
Name and contact details at the top. A short personal statement. Career history in reverse order, most recent first. Education after that, unless you graduated in the last two years. Anything else, such as certifications, systems or languages, at the end and kept brief.
That order exists because it matches the way people read a CV. Departing from it to look different rarely pays off.
Write a personal statement, not an essay
Three or four lines. Who you are professionally, what you’re good at, and what you’re looking for next.
Avoid adjectives you can’t back up. “A highly motivated, results-driven team player” says nothing, because nobody has ever described themselves as a fairly unmotivated individual who works best alone.
Achievements, not duties
This is where most CVs lose ground. A list of responsibilities describes the job. It says little about how well you did it.
Better: Cleared a six-month invoice backlog in ten weeks and cut supplier queries by a third.
Same job. The second one was written by someone who did it well. Put a number on it wherever you can: money saved, time cut, volume handled, people managed.
Tailor it, without rewriting it
You don’t need a fresh CV for every application. You do need the things a job description asks for to be visible in the top half of the first page. If a role leans heavily on systems experience and yours is buried in a bullet point on page two, move it up.
How long it should be
Two pages suits most people. Three is defensible if you have twenty years behind you and all of it is relevant. One page is fine early in a career and reads as confident.
If you’re running past three pages, the culprit is usually the jobs from fifteen years ago. Those can become a line each.
Keep the formatting plain
Readable beats designed. A lot of employers run CVs through software before a person sees them, and columns, text boxes, headers, footers and graphics can come out scrambled at the other end.
Use a standard font, clear headings and normal margins. Send it as a Word document unless you’ve been asked for a PDF. Photos aren’t expected in the UK and don’t work in your favour.
The things that cost people interviews
- Typos, particularly in the first three lines.
- Dates that don’t add up, or gaps with no explanation.
- An email address you set up as a teen.
- Listing every task in a job instead of the ones that mattered.
- A different font or format for each role, which usually means it was assembled in a hurry.
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