How To Write A Good CV

How to Write a Good CV: What Recruiters Actually Look For

Before I trained as a career coach, I spent years in recruitment, reading CVs by the hundred. So let me tell you what really happens to yours when you hit send: it gets a few seconds. Not a careful read, a scan. The recruiter is looking for a handful of things, and if they can’t find them quickly, you’re in the “no” pile before you’ve had a fair hearing.

That sounds harsh, but it’s good news. It means writing a good CV isn’t about clever wording or a fancy template. It’s about making the right things obvious to a busy person who is skimming. Get that right and the rest takes care of itself.

How to write a good CV: the short version

If you’re short on time, here’s the whole thing in one place. To write a good CV:

1. Use a clear, standard structure — reverse-chronological order, your most recent role first, with the sections laid out the way recruiters expect to see them.
2. Keep it to two pages — long enough to prove yourself, short enough to actually get read.
3. Lead with achievements, not duties — start each bullet point with what you did and the result it got, not what you were “responsible for.”
4. Open with a short, targeted personal profile — three or four lines pitched at the specific job you want.
5. Back your claims up with numbers — figures are concrete and they stop a skim-reader in their tracks.
6. Make it easy for the software to read — clean formatting, no tables, columns or graphics that trip up the applicant tracking system.
7. Cut anything that doesn’t help — no photo, date of birth, tired clichés, or “references available on request.”
8. Tailor it to every job — mirror the language of the advert and reorder the top of your CV to match what that role is asking for.

That’s the good CV in a nutshell. The rest of this guide takes each of these in turn, with examples.

How to structure your CV

Most people overthink this. There’s a standard order recruiters expect to see, and the reason to stick to it is simple, when your CV looks the way they expect, they can find what they need without effort. Fight the convention and you just make their job harder.

For almost everyone, the best way to write a CV is in reverse chronological order: your most recent role first, working backwards. The sequence that works:

1. Name and contact details — just your name, phone number, email, and a LinkedIn URL. No need for a full home address; your town or city is plenty.
2. A short personal profile — three or four lines that tell the reader who you are professionally and what you’re aiming at.
3. Work experience — your roles, most recent first, written as achievements rather than job descriptions (more on this below).
4. Education and qualifications — kept brief once you’re a few years into your career.
5. Anything genuinely relevant — key skills, professional memberships, certifications.

On length: two pages is the norm for most experienced professionals, and there’s no prize for squeezing everything onto one. If you’re early in your career, one page is fine. If you’re heading past two, you’re almost certainly including things that no longer earn their place.

Keep the formatting clean and boring. A clear, readable font, consistent spacing, sensible headings. Avoid tables, columns, text boxes, and graphics, they look smart to you and confuse the applicant tracking software that reads your CV before a human ever does. If the system can’t parse it, the human never sees it.

What to include in your CV

This is where most people go wrong, so it’s worth being precise about what to write on a CV.

Your personal profile. Short, sharp, and pointed at the job you actually want. This is not the place for “a hard-working team player seeking a challenging role.” It’s the place to say, in plain terms, what you do and the value you bring. Write it last, once the rest of the CV has reminded you how good you are.

Your work experience — as achievements, not duties. This is the single biggest difference between a CV that works and one that doesn’t. Anyone can list what they were responsible for. A good CV shows what you actually did and what happened as a result.

So instead of “Responsible for managing the social media accounts,” you write “Grew the company’s LinkedIn following from 2,000 to 11,000 in a year, which brought in 40 qualified leads a month.”

The trick is to lead with the action, the thing you did, and follow it with the outcome. Weight your bullet points heavily toward that. The context matters far less than the doing and the result, so don’t waste your best lines setting the scene.

Numbers. Wherever you can, quantify. Money saved, time cut, people managed, percentages moved. Numbers stop a skim-reader in their tracks because they’re concrete and they stand out on the page.

Only what’s relevant. Skills, education, extras, include them if they help you land this job, and cut them if they don’t.

What not to include in your CV

Just as important as what goes in is what stays out. Plenty of CVs are sunk by things that should never have been there.

Leave out:

• A photo, your date of birth, age, or marital status. None of it is relevant in the UK, and all of it invites bias.
• “References available on request.” Everyone knows you’ll provide them. It just wastes a line.
• Generic clichés — hard-working, team player, results-driven, thinks outside the box. They tell the reader nothing because everyone writes them.
• A wall of duties copied from your job description. Responsibilities are not achievements.
• Ancient or irrelevant history. That Saturday job from twenty years ago can go.
• Anything that isn’t true. Stretching the truth feels harmless until you’re asked about it in an interview, or worse, after you’ve been hired.

And the one that costs more candidates than any of the above: spelling and grammar mistakes. Read it aloud. Get someone else to read it. A single sloppy error tells a recruiter you don’t check your work, and that impression is very hard to undo.

How to tailor your CV

If you take one thing from this article, take this: there is no such thing as a good CV in the abstract. There’s only a CV that’s right for the job in front of you.

The most common mistake I see is people writing one CV and firing it at every vacancy. It never works as well as a tailored one, because a generic CV is, by definition, aimed at no one in particular.

Tailoring doesn’t mean rewriting from scratch each time. It means:

• Reading the job advert and person specification properly and noting the exact requirements they’ve listed.
• Matching your evidence to each one. If they want budget management, make sure your CV shows you managing a budget — and make it easy to find.
• Mirroring their language. If they call it “stakeholder engagement,” use that phrase rather than your own version of it. This helps with the tracking software and signals to the human that you speak their language.
• Reordering the top third of your CV so the most relevant experience and skills sit where the eye lands first.

You’re not inventing anything. You’re surfacing the parts of your real experience that matter most for this particular role, and pushing the rest down.

The short version

Knowing how to construct a CV comes down to a few honest principles. Make it easy to scan. Lead with what you did and what came of it. Cut anything that doesn’t help. And write it for one specific reader, the person hiring for the one job you actually want.

Do that, and you stop hoping your CV gets read and start making sure it does.

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