How to write a CV

A recruiter may give your CV less than a minute on the first read. The goal is not to list everything you have done. It is to make the right things easy to find.

Start with the job, not with your history

Before you write anything, read the job advertisement closely and pick out the four or five things the employer cares about most. They are usually in the first few lines of the responsibilities and in the "essential" criteria. These are what the reader will be looking for, and your CV should answer them quickly.

This is why one CV rarely fits every application. Keep a complete master version with everything in it, and cut a copy down for each role you apply for. In CV Editor you can keep separate versions by saving each as a data file.

The sections, in order

1. Name and contact details

Your name, a phone number, a professional email address, your city, and a LinkedIn or portfolio link if you have one. You don't need your full street address, date of birth, marital status or a photo. In Australia, the UK and the US these are not expected, and leaving them out avoids giving anyone a reason for bias.

2. A title line

One line under your name that says what you do, such as "Registered Nurse | Emergency and Critical Care" or "Senior Accountant". It frames everything that follows. If you are changing careers, use the title of the job you are applying for, as long as your experience supports it.

3. Summary

Three or four sentences at the top that answer: who are you professionally, what are you good at, and what are you looking for? Be specific. "Motivated team player with excellent communication skills" could describe anyone. "Payroll specialist with six years in multi-state payroll for companies of 500 to 3,000 staff" tells the reader something.

4. Experience

List your roles in reverse order, most recent first. For each one include the employer, your title, and the dates (month and year is enough). Then describe what you did in a few lines or bullet points. More on how to write these below.

Give the most space to your recent and most relevant roles. Jobs from more than ten or fifteen years ago can usually be reduced to a single line, or grouped together under "Earlier career".

5. Education and qualifications

Degrees, diplomas, trade qualifications and professional certifications, with the institution and year. If you have been working for a few years, this goes after experience. If you are a recent graduate, put it before experience, and include relevant subjects, projects or results.

6. Skills

A short list of skills that matter for the role: tools, software, methods, languages, licences. Keep it concrete. "Microsoft Excel (pivot tables, Power Query)" is more useful than "computer literate". If you use a layout with a sidebar, this is a good place for it.

Describe results, not duties

The most common weakness in a CV is a list of responsibilities copied from a job description. The reader already knows roughly what a store manager or a software engineer does. What they don't know is how well you did it.

For each role, try to show what changed because you were there. A simple pattern is: what you did, how, and what came of it.

Instead of	Try
Responsible for customer service.	Handled 40 to 60 customer enquiries a day and kept satisfaction scores above 90% across two years.
Managed social media accounts.	Grew the Instagram audience from 2,000 to 11,000 followers in a year with a weekly content plan and a small paid budget.
Worked on the new billing system.	Led testing for a new billing system, finding and resolving 120 defects before launch, which went live with no customer-facing outages.

Numbers help, but they are not the only kind of result. Being trusted with something, being promoted, training others, or fixing a problem nobody else had solved all show the same thing: that you made a difference.

Start bullet points with a strong verb (led, built, reduced, introduced, negotiated) and write in the first person without the "I". Keep each point to one or two lines.

How long should a CV be?

For most jobs in Australia and the UK, two pages is the norm and three is the upper limit for experienced candidates. In the US a resume is typically one page, or two for senior roles. Academic and medical CVs are the exception and can run much longer. See CV or resume? for the details.

If yours is running long, cut the oldest roles first, then trim duties that don't relate to the job you want.

Formatting that helps the reader

Use one clear design and stick to it. Consistent headings, dates in the same place for every role, and enough white space for the eye to find things.
Keep text readable. Body text around 9 to 11 points in a plain font. Don't shrink the text to squeeze more in. Cut words instead.
Save as PDF. A PDF looks the same on every screen and printer. Make sure it contains real text rather than an image, because many employers screen CVs with software. Our guide to ATS-friendly CVs covers this.
Name the file sensibly. "Jordan_Avery_CV.pdf" rather than "CV_final_v3.pdf".

Final checks before you send it

Read it out loud, or have someone else read it. Spelling mistakes are the quickest way to lose a reader's goodwill.
Check that every date lines up and there are no unexplained gaps. If there is a gap, a short line such as "Career break: caring for a family member" is enough.
Make sure your phone number and email are correct. It happens more often than you would think.
Open the PDF on another device to confirm it looks the way you expect.
Compare it against the job advertisement one last time. Can the reader find evidence for each key requirement within a minute?

Put it into practice. Open the editor and start from the sample, or import your current CV as a PDF and improve it section by section.