How to write a CV that actually says something

A CV is a short, boring document with an unusually high stake attached to it. It is read quickly, by someone who has a stack of them, who is looking for a reason to put yours in the smaller pile. Everything below follows from that one fact.

1. What a CV is actually for

A CV is not your professional autobiography, and it is not a legal record of everywhere you have been. It is an argument: that you can do a specific job, backed by evidence from what you have already done. Everything that does not serve that argument is taking up space that something better could use.

The first read is not really a read at all. It is a scan, and a fast one — the widely-repeated rule of thumb is that a first pass takes a handful of seconds. Treat that number as folklore rather than science, but the underlying behaviour is real and worth designing for: someone looks at your CV, forms an impression, and only then decides whether to read properly.

So the honest test is this. Cover everything except the top third of page one. In what is left, can a stranger tell:

• What you are — a job title or a discipline, in plain words;
• At what level — roughly how senior, from your most recent role;
• Where — the kind of organisation, the kind of work;
• Why they should keep reading — one concrete, specific thing.

If they cannot, no amount of good writing further down will save it, because the reader will not get there. Fix the top third first.

2. Structure and section order

There is no single correct order, but there is a defensible default, and deviating from it should be a decision rather than an accident. Sections appear in the order the reader needs them:

Contact details: what to include, and what to stop including

Include your name, a professional email address, a phone number, and the city and country you are in — that last one matters more than people think, because it answers a question the reader has immediately and would otherwise have to guess at. Add links only where they are worth clicking: a portfolio, a repository, a publication list.

Leave out your full street address, your date of birth, your marital status, your nationality, and a photograph — unless you are applying somewhere that conventionally expects a photo, which varies by country. None of it helps your argument, and in several hiring cultures it is actively unwelcome.

Reverse chronological, and when not to

Reverse chronological — most recent role first — is the default for a reason: it is what readers expect, it is easy to scan, and it makes the shape of a career legible. Purely functional or skills-based CVs, where roles are hidden behind themed skill headings, tend to read as evasive, because the most common reason to hide a timeline is that there is something in it.

If your history is genuinely non-linear — freelance work, a career change, parallel contracts — keep the reverse-chronological spine and group sensibly: a single "Freelance and contract work" entry with the clients as sub-items reads far better than eleven two-month roles listed separately.

3. Writing the summary

The summary is the most-read and most-wasted part of a CV. Most of them are made entirely of words that could describe anybody: results-driven, passionate, dynamic, proven track record, team player. If a sentence would survive being pasted onto a stranger's CV, it is not doing anything on yours.

A summary that works usually contains four things, in about three or four lines:

1. What you are and for how long — the plain-language job title.
2. Where you have done it — the domain, sector or kind of organisation.
3. One piece of hard evidence — the single most impressive true thing.
4. What you are aiming at — the direction, tied to this application.

Two practical notes. First, write the summary last — it is a distillation of the rest, and writing it first tends to produce a wish list rather than a summary. Second, the summary is the one part you should genuinely rewrite for each application; it costs three minutes and it is the part most likely to be read.

4. Writing experience bullets

This is the section that matters. If you fix nothing else, fix this. A hiring manager can forgive a plain template and a thin skills list; they cannot do anything with four bullets that describe a job description rather than a person doing a job.

The difference between a responsibility and an accomplishment

Almost every weak CV is a list of responsibilities. Responsibilities describe the shape of the job — anyone with that title had them. Accomplishments describe what changed because you were the one in it.

The test: could your predecessor have written the same sentence? If yes, it is a responsibility, and it is costing you a line.

Strong openers

Start each bullet with a verb that carries information about what you did. "Responsible for", "Tasked with", "Helped with", "Worked on" and "Involved in" all begin by putting distance between you and the work. Compare the specificity of these:

Vary them. Six consecutive bullets starting with "Managed" reads as a shopping list and makes a varied career look monotonous.

Quantifying honestly

Numbers are the fastest way to make a claim credible, which is exactly why inventing them is the fastest way to lose a job offer in a follow-up question. The rule is simple: every number on your CV must be one you can talk about for two minutes without becoming uncomfortable.

Useful numbers are not only percentages of revenue. Consider:

• Scale — team size, budget, number of clients, records, sites, tickets;
• Frequency — releases per month, reports per quarter, shifts per week;
• Time — how long something took before, and after;
• Range — countries, languages, systems, departments involved;
• Change — from X to Y, over a stated period.

Be precise about attribution. "Increased revenue 40%" invites the question of what you personally did; "Rebuilt the onboarding flow; the trial-to-paid rate went from 6% to 9% over the following quarter" says the same thing and survives scrutiny. Honest hedging — "contributed to", "one of four engineers on" — costs you nothing and buys credibility.

What to do when you genuinely cannot share numbers

Plenty of good work is unquantifiable, confidential, or happened somewhere that never measured anything. This is common and it is not fatal. Substitute a different kind of evidence:

• Scope and stakes — "the only designer supporting three product teams", "owned the migration for the firm's largest account".
• Before and after, described — "replaced a spreadsheet-based rota that had to be rebuilt by hand each week with a shared system the shift leads maintain themselves".
• Difficulty — "delivered during a hiring freeze with no external budget", "ran the handover after both senior staff left within a month".
• Durability — "the process is still in use three years later", "adopted by the other two regional offices".
• Recognition with a source — "asked to present the approach at the annual engineering review".

If the work is under NDA, describe the shape without the specifics: "a payments integration for a top-five UK retailer (client confidential)" is legitimate and readable.

How many bullets, and how long

Three to six bullets for a recent, relevant role; one to three for older or less relevant ones; a single line for anything more than about a decade back. Each bullet should be one or two lines on the page. A bullet running to four lines is a paragraph wearing a bullet's clothing, and readers skip it.

Weight follows relevance, not recency alone. If the job you want resembles a role you held three positions ago, give that role the space and let the intervening ones be brief.

Four more rewrites

5. Tailoring to a job description

Tailoring is not rewriting your CV from scratch for every application, which is unsustainable and produces worse CVs. It is a focused half-hour on the parts that carry the argument.

Read the posting twice. On the second pass, mark it up:

1. The must-haves — usually the first three or four requirements, and anything repeated in different words. These are what the CV has to answer.
2. The vocabulary — does the company say "clients" or "customers", "programme" or "project", "growth" or "demand generation"? Speaking their dialect is not gaming anything; it is being legible.
3. The problem behind the posting — a role is usually created because something hurts. A "first data hire" posting is a company drowning in spreadsheets. A job that lists "documentation" three times has a knowledge problem. Address the pain, not just the bullet list.

Then change four things: the summary, the order of your skills, which bullets are on top within each role, and how much space each role gets. That is usually enough. If it is not — if you would have to change your whole CV to be a plausible candidate — that is useful information about the application, not a writing problem.

If you keep the job descriptions you are applying to, comparing them against your CV side by side is worth doing deliberately rather than from memory. Tessira lets you save a job description and run a match against a chosen CV, which returns what it can and cannot find evidence for; the useful output is usually the "missing" list, because it tells you what to write about, not what to add to a keyword line.

6. Skills, without the fake proficiency bars

The skills section exists so a reader scanning for a specific capability finds it in two seconds. That is its whole job. It is not a place to prove breadth.

Three rules:

• Group them. Six labelled clusters — Languages, Data, Infrastructure, Design, Methods — are far easier to scan than thirty comma-separated items, and the grouping itself shows judgement.
• Cut anything you would not want to be asked about. A skill on your CV is an invitation to a question. If a tool you used once for a fortnight is on the list, you have handed the interviewer an awkward five minutes.
• Drop the assumed basics. "Microsoft Word", "email", "internet research" and, in most fields, "Microsoft Office" read as padding.

Why the five-star bars are a bad idea

Rating yourself 4/5 on Python, or filling in 80% of a bar for "Leadership", looks tidy and means nothing. The scale is undefined, the comparison class is undefined, and you are inviting a reader to disagree with a number you made up. Worse, they hand an interviewer a trap: "you have put yourself at four out of five on SQL — what would five look like?"

Say something checkable instead. For languages, the conventional levels — native, fluent, professional working proficiency, conversational — mean something to readers. For tools, context does the work: "Python (daily, five years — the reporting service above)" tells a reader more than any bar ever will.

7. Education and early-career CVs

For anyone with a few years of work behind them, education is a short block near the bottom: institution, qualification, subject, year. Drop the modules, the grades of individual papers, and secondary school entirely once you have a degree and a job history. Keep a strong overall grade if it is genuinely strong and recent.

When you do not have much experience yet

The advice "just put your education first" is true but insufficient. The real task is to find the evidence you do have and treat it like work, because it was work:

• Substantial coursework and dissertations — a final-year project is a self-directed piece of work with a scope, a method and a result. Write it up in bullets like a role.
• Part-time and unrelated jobs — do not hide the café job. Reliability, handling people under pressure and cash accuracy are real, and a reader respects someone who worked through their degree. Write it honestly, briefly, and without apology.
• Societies, teams, volunteering — running a society budget or a fixture list is administration, negotiation and logistics.
• Personal projects — with a link, if there is something to look at. One finished small thing beats five abandoned ambitious ones.
• Internships and placements — as roles, in the experience section, with the length stated.

What to avoid: inflating a two-week shadowing placement into a "consulting engagement", listing every certificate from a free online course, or padding with a long "Interests" section. Under-experienced and honest reads much better than over-claimed and thin.

8. Length, and what to cut

The one-page rule is a convention, not a law, and it varies by country and field. A workable position:

Two pages of substance beat one page achieved by shrinking the type to 8pt and removing all the whitespace. Density is the real constraint, not page count. If you need to cut, cut in this order:

1. Anything about a job more than 10–15 years ago beyond title, employer and dates.
2. Responsibilities that repeat across similar roles — keep the best instance.
3. The words successfully, various, numerous, utilised, in order to, and any sentence containing "duties included".
4. Skills you would not want tested.
5. "References available on request" — assumed, and a wasted line.
6. Hobbies that say nothing: "socialising with friends", "watching films", "music".

9. Formatting and ATS readability

Applicant tracking systems are databases with a parser in front of them. When you upload a CV, the parser tries to pull out your contact details, employers, dates, titles and skills into structured fields. Sometimes a recruiter searches those fields; more often they simply read the file. There is a lot of mythology here, so, plainly:

• There is no universal score. Different systems parse differently and nobody can promise a number. Any product claiming a guaranteed "ATS score" is guessing.
• Parsing is about structure, not magic words. A clean, conventional document parses well. A three-column layout with the job titles inside text boxes does not.
• Rejection is done by people and by filters they set — years of experience, location, right to work — not by a design-quality algorithm.

What actually helps a parser, all of which also helps a human:

• A real, text-based PDF, not a scan or an exported image. If you can select the text in a PDF reader, so can the parser.
• Conventional section headings: "Experience", "Education", "Skills". Clever alternatives like "My Journey" or "Where I've Left My Mark" cost you the mapping.
• Consistent, unambiguous dates — "Mar 2021 – Jun 2024" throughout. Mixing "03/21" and "Spring 2021" makes a mess of a timeline.
• Employer, job title and dates as plain text, near each other, not embedded in a graphic or a header/footer.
• Text, not pictures of text. No skills displayed as an infographic, no contact details in a logo.
• Standard fonts and a single column for the main narrative. Sidebars are usually fine for short scannable items; the experience section should flow in one column.
• Contact details in the body, not only in the document header — some parsers ignore headers and footers entirely.

Typography, quickly

• 10–12pt body text, and do not go below 9.5pt to win an argument with the page.
• Generous margins. White space is what makes a document scannable.
• One typeface, two or three weights. Two typefaces at most if you are confident.
• One accent colour, used consistently, with real contrast against white.
• Alignment matters more than decoration: if the dates form a straight edge and the headings are consistently spaced, the document reads as competent before a word is read.
• File name: Firstname-Lastname-CV.pdf. Not cv_final_v7_REAL.pdf.

10. Common mistakes

A word about gaps

Gaps are ordinary. Illness, caring, redundancy, study, travel, a bad job you left without another lined up — hiring managers have all seen them, and most have had one. What draws attention is the attempt to hide it: shifting to year-only dates so that "2021" to "2023" conceals eighteen months is a trick readers know, and it makes an unremarkable gap look like something worth investigating.

State it, briefly, without apology, and move on. One line is enough. If you did anything during it that is relevant — a course, freelance work, a family business — say so; if you did not, "Career break" is a complete answer.

11. The proofreading checklist

Do this last, on a printed page or a full-screen PDF, and preferably a day after you finished writing. Reading aloud catches things silent reading does not.

• Your name, email and phone number are correct — checked character by character.
• Every date is in the same format, and the timeline has no accidental overlaps or unexplained holes.
• Current role is present tense; every finished role is past tense.
• One spelling convention throughout — UK or US, not both.
• No bullet starts with "Responsible for", "Helped with" or "Worked on".
• No two consecutive bullets start with the same verb.
• Every number is one you can discuss confidently for two minutes.
• No claim you would not repeat to the person's face in an interview.
• The company name in the summary — if you named one — is the right company.
• No double spaces, no space before a comma or full stop, consistent bullet punctuation.
• Nothing crosses a page break badly: no orphaned heading at the foot of a page, no single line stranded at the top of the last.
• The file is a selectable-text PDF, named with your actual name.
• Someone else has read it — ideally someone who does not know your job.

Spell-check will not catch "manger" for "manager", "pubic" for "public", or the wrong company name pasted from the last application. Those are the ones that hurt, and they are caught by reading, not by software.

12. Questions people actually ask

Next: once the CV works, the CV becomes the script for the conversation. Our companion guide to preparing for interviews covers turning these bullets into stories people remember.