How to Improve Your CV: 10 Changes I’d Make First

If you Google how to improve your CV, you’ll find hundreds of tips.

Change the font. Add keywords. Remove keywords. Make it one page. Make it two pages. Add a skills section. Remove the skills section. Use colour. Don’t use colour.

You can spend an entire weekend “improving” your CV and end up with basically the same CV in a different font.

If I was looking at a CV that wasn’t getting interviews, I wouldn’t start there.

I’d start with the things that could actually change somebody’s decision.

1. Make your target obvious

Within the first part of your CV, I should have a pretty good idea what you do.

If your profile is vague, your title doesn’t translate well outside your company and your recent experience covers several different areas, I might not.

That’s a problem.

You don’t need to write “SEEKING A NEW ROLE AS A FINANCE DIRECTOR” across the top.

You just need the document to make sense for the jobs you’re applying for.

2. Rewrite your profile if it says nothing

Delete phrases like:

“Hard-working.”

“Results-driven.”

“Excellent communicator.”

“Works well independently and as part of a team.”

None of these things differentiate you because everybody claims them.

Use that space to tell me something I couldn’t say about 80% of the people applying.

What do you actually do? At what level? In what sort of environment? What’s relevant about your background?

Your profile should position you, not compliment you.

3. Add context to your jobs

Job title, company, dates.

Fine.

But sometimes I need more.

If you worked for a company I’ve never heard of, one short line telling me what it does can completely change how I understand the role.

If you managed a huge operation, tell me the scale.

If your title massively undersells what you did, explain the remit.

Context makes everything that follows easier to judge.

4. Cut the responsibilities everybody would expect

If you’re an HR Director, I don’t need six bullets establishing that you worked with senior stakeholders, managed an HR team and developed HR strategy.

I’d be quite surprised if you didn’t.

You need enough responsibility information for me to understand your remit, but don’t waste half the page proving you performed the basic functions of the job.

Use that space for evidence.

5. Add the things you’re actually proud of

This is the exercise I’d genuinely do.

Forget your CV for ten minutes.

Take each of your last few jobs and ask:

What did I do there that I’m genuinely proud of?

The answer is often far more interesting than what’s currently written on the CV.

Maybe you won a massive client.

Maybe you inherited a terrible team and turned it around.

Maybe you delivered something everyone thought would fail.

Maybe you built a function from nothing.

Maybe you got promoted twice.

Maybe you fixed a process that had been causing problems for years.

That’s the stuff I want to know.

6. Give me scale

“Managed a team.”

Two people or 200?

“Responsible for budget.”

£20,000 or £20 million?

“Managed key clients.”

Local businesses or three of the world’s biggest banks?

Numbers aren’t only useful as achievements.

They provide context.

A few well-chosen numbers can tell me more about the seniority and complexity of your work than an entire paragraph of adjectives.

7. Bring the relevant evidence forwards

Your CV doesn’t need to give equal weight to everything you’ve ever done.

If you’re applying for a role that heavily involves transformation and you’ve led three major transformation programmes, don’t make me hunt for them.

If you’re moving into leadership, show me the leadership.

If you’re applying for a commercial role, bring forward the commercial evidence.

This is what sensible tailoring looks like.

Not copying keywords.

Changing the emphasis.

8. Remove things that have stopped earning their space

Every line on your CV should justify being there.

That doesn’t mean brutally deleting half your career to satisfy an arbitrary page limit.

It means asking whether the information is still useful.

A detailed description of the Saturday job you had 18 years ago probably isn’t helping you get a Head of Finance role.

Neither is a list of Microsoft Office applications if you’re applying for a senior professional position where everybody is reasonably expected to know how to use email.

Space isn’t precious because of some magical two-page rule.

Attention is precious.

9. Make it easier to scan

I don’t mean redesign it.

I mean look at the page.

Can you immediately see where one job ends and another begins?

Can you find dates?

Are there huge blocks of text?

Are your best achievements buried among 12 identical-looking bullets?

Good formatting isn’t decoration.

It’s navigation.

The reader should be able to find the evidence they need without wrestling your document.

10. Check whether you’ve fixed the actual problem

This is the bit most people miss.

Maybe your CV wasn’t the problem.

If you’re getting recruiter calls from a decent proportion of your applications, the CV is already creating interest.

If you’re getting first interviews but no further, rewriting the profile on your CV for the 14th time probably isn’t where I’d spend my energy.

Your job search has different stages, and you need to fix the stage that’s actually breaking. I’ve explained how to diagnose that in Your Job Search Has a Conversion Problem. Lee Harding

But if you’re applying for sensible jobs and hearing almost nothing, then yes, I’d take a very hard look at the CV.

And I’d start with these ten things before worrying whether Calibri is destroying your career.

If you want to know where your current CV actually needs work, use my Free CV Score before rewriting the whole thing.

Score your CV free and start with the problems that actually matter.