How to write a CV

A CV has one job: to get you into a conversation. It is not a biography, and nobody is going to read it the way you wrote it. The first pass takes somewhere between six and thirty seconds, and it is looking for a small number of things — what you do, where you have done it, and whether the recent part matches the job on the desk.

Put the sections in this order

Unless you have a specific reason to do otherwise, this order works for almost everyone because it front-loads what a reader is looking for.

1. Name, job title and contact details. No heading needed — it is obvious what it is.
2. A professional summary of three or four lines.
3. Work experience, most recent first.
4. Education, most recent first.
5. Skills.
6. Anything else that earns its space: languages, certifications, projects.

The exception is anyone with less than about two years of work: put education above experience until the experience is the more interesting half.

Write the summary last

The summary is the hardest paragraph on the page and the easiest to write badly, because on a blank page you have nothing to summarise. Fill in the rest first, then read your own experience section back and write three lines that say: what you are, how long you have been doing it, and the single most useful thing you have done.

Make the bullets do the work

Under each role, three to five bullets. Each one starts with a verb, describes something you actually changed, and where possible ends in a number. The number is not there to impress anyone — it is there because it forces the sentence to be about an outcome instead of a duty.

• Weak: "Responsible for managing the team rota."
• Better: "Rebuilt the shift rota for 40 staff, cutting unfilled shifts from 12 a month to 2."
• Weak: "Involved in the website redesign."
• Better: "Led the checkout rebuild, which took cart abandonment from 71% to 58% over two quarters."

Tailor by reordering, not rewriting

Rewriting your CV for every application is why people stop applying. Instead, keep one full version and adjust two things per application: the summary, and the order of the bullets under your most recent role so the relevant ones are first. That takes four minutes and gets most of the benefit.

Before you send it

• Read it out loud. You will hear the clumsy sentences you cannot see.
• Check the dates line up and there are no unexplained gaps of more than a few months.
• Save as PDF, not a Word file, so the layout survives the journey.
• Name the file something a stranger can find again: Firstname-Lastname-CV.pdf.