How to Write a CV That Actually Gets Read

There is no perfect CV.

I’ve worked in recruitment for more than 20 years, reviewed thousands of CVs and seen people get interviews with one-page CVs, three-page CVs, colourful CVs, boring CVs, CVs made in Canva and CVs that look like they were created in Microsoft Word in 2003.

I’ve also rejected plenty of beautifully designed ones.

Because the thing people sometimes forget when they’re writing a CV is what it’s actually supposed to do.

Your CV has one job: give somebody enough reason to want to speak to you.

It doesn’t need to tell them everything you’ve ever done. It doesn’t need to answer every question they could possibly ask. And it definitely doesn’t need to satisfy 47 arbitrary CV rules somebody came up with on LinkedIn.

It needs to make it easy for somebody who doesn’t know you to understand what you do, see why you’re relevant and find some evidence that you’re good at it.

Start with the job you actually want

One of the worst ways to write a CV is to open a blank document and start trying to remember your entire career.

You end up writing a historical record.

Started here. Did this. Moved there. Did that. Got promoted. Did something else.

All completely accurate, but that’s not necessarily the information somebody hiring for your next job needs.

Before writing anything, I’d be clear about the kind of job you’re trying to get.

You don’t necessarily need one incredibly specific job title, but you should have a reasonably clear target. If you’re trying to make one CV position you simultaneously for Head of Marketing, Project Manager and Operations Director roles, you’ve made the job much harder.

Once you know the sort of role you’re targeting, you can make decisions about what deserves space.

Make it obvious who you are

The top of your CV shouldn’t require much detective work.

I want to understand roughly what you do and at what level.

A short profile can help with this, but only if it actually says something.

If your opening paragraph describes you as a “results-driven professional with excellent communication skills and a proven track record of delivering in fast-paced environments”, I still don’t know what you do.

You could be an accountant, a salesperson or an astronaut.

Tell me something useful.

What’s your area of expertise? What level do you operate at? What sort of environments have you worked in? What’s particularly relevant about you for the roles you’re targeting?

You don’t need to cram your entire career into four lines. Give me enough context to make me want to keep reading.

Your recent experience should do most of the work

Your employment history is usually the most important part of your CV.

For each recent role, I want enough context to understand the job.

A title and company name aren’t always enough.

“Head of Operations” could mean responsibility for five people in a £2 million business or 500 people across 20 locations.

If scale matters, give me scale.

Then explain what you actually did.

Responsibilities aren’t banned. This is one of those bits of CV advice that gets turned into a silly absolute. Of course I need to know what you were responsible for.

But responsibilities alone aren’t enough.

Your CV also needs to show your impact.

This is the difference I explained in 12 CV Mistakes That Make It Harder to Get an Interview: telling me what the job required doesn’t necessarily tell me how good you were at doing it.

Give me both.

Show me what changed because you were there

This doesn’t mean putting a percentage on every bullet point.

Some of the worst CV writing I’ve seen comes from people who’ve been told every achievement needs a number.

Suddenly they’ve “improved stakeholder engagement by 30%” and “increased team collaboration by 25%”, and I’ve got absolutely no idea where either number came from.

Use numbers when they’re real.

Revenue. Costs. Team size. Customer numbers. Budgets. Time saved. Growth. Delivery times. Performance against targets.

They’re useful because they give me scale and evidence.

But achievements don’t have to be numerical.

Maybe you built a team from scratch, fixed something that wasn’t working, launched a new service, introduced a system, took over a struggling project or became trusted with your company’s biggest client.

Those things tell me something too.

Make the important information easy to find

People sometimes interpret this as “recruiters only spend six seconds reading your CV”.

I’ve never sat there with a stopwatch.

Sometimes I can reject a CV almost immediately because the person clearly isn’t right for the job. Sometimes I’ll spend several minutes reading one because the person looks interesting.

What matters is that your CV works when somebody scans it and when they read it properly.

If I glance at it, can I understand your career?

If I look more closely, can I find the evidence?

That’s why structure matters more to me than whether you picked Arial or Calibri.

Clear headings. Sensible spacing. Dates I can follow. Jobs I can identify. Important information that isn’t buried inside enormous blocks of text.

Don’t make reading your CV harder than it needs to be.

Don’t write for a mythical ATS robot

Yes, Applicant Tracking Systems exist.

I’ve used them for years.

No, that doesn’t mean there’s a universal secret ATS score your CV needs to achieve before you’re allowed through the gates.

If the job requires Excel and you’re brilliant at Excel, say Excel.

If you’ve managed teams and the job requires management experience, make that obvious.

Use the language employers and recruiters use because it helps them understand your experience.

That’s very different from stuffing the same phrase into your CV 14 times because an online checker told you that you only had a 72% keyword match.

Write for relevance and clarity.

Your CV doesn’t need to contain your entire life

The longer your career gets, the more editing matters.

If you’ve got 20 years of experience, your first job doesn’t usually need the same amount of detail as your current one.

That’s not because old experience has somehow expired.

It’s because you’ve accumulated better evidence since.

Your CV has limited attention available. Spend it on the things most likely to influence the decision you’re asking somebody to make now.

Then read it as somebody who doesn’t know you

This is the difficult bit.

You know what everything means.

You know that project was enormous. You know why that promotion mattered. You know what your company does. You know that strange internal job title was actually a very senior role.

The recruiter doesn’t.

That’s why good people can have very average CVs. I wrote about exactly that problem in Your CV Looks Fine. So Why Isn’t It Getting Interviews?.

Try to read your CV without supplying the missing context from your own head.

Would somebody who had never met you understand what you do, what you’re good at and why they should interview you?

If they would, you’re getting somewhere.

If you can’t tell anymore because you’ve stared at the bloody thing for six hours, that’s exactly why I built my Free CV Score.

Upload your current CV and get an outside view before you start changing things that might already be working.

Score your CV free and find out what actually needs improving.