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Practical notes on writing, formatting and adapting a CV for real applications. For the complete step-by-step foundations, use the CV guides; for worked examples by role, browse CV examples.
The most repeated CV advice is "quantify your achievements". For a great many real jobs the numbers either do not exist, are not yours to share, or would be meaningless out of context. Inventing one is worse than having none.
6 min read·Published 17 Sept 2026
Specific writing problems: wording, evidence, and what to do when the usual advice does not fit.
A document written in pieces over several years converges on the same few sentences. The person who wrote every one of those pieces is the least able to see it, because rereading your own writing checks the meaning and skips the wording.
7 min read
The most repeated CV advice is "quantify your achievements". For a great many real jobs the numbers either do not exist, are not yours to share, or would be meaningless out of context. Inventing one is worse than having none.
6 min read
How files behave when software reads them, and how to check yours rather than hope.
A PDF can look perfect on screen and still arrive as an unreadable block. The check takes about thirty seconds, needs nothing but the file and a text editor, and tells you what is wrong rather than just that something is.
7 min read
The decisions around the document — what to send, what to explain, and when.
Sent together, the two documents usually say the same thing twice. The division of labour is straightforward once you notice that they answer different questions — and that only one of them gets stored, forwarded and read again in three weeks.
8 min read
Headcount is the easiest seniority signal to read, which is why CVs lean on it. If you have reached a senior level as an individual contributor, the evidence has to come from somewhere else — and there is usually more of it than people write down.
6 min read
Most people maintain one CV and edit it under deadline, which is how detail gets lost permanently. Keeping a complete record separately, and cutting a copy down for each application, is less work rather than more.
5 min read
Applying across borders, and the conventions that change when you do.
A CV written from outside the single market is usually asked to prove eligibility, prove recognition and prove equivalence. All three are decided elsewhere, by named authorities, and the EU’s own citizen-information pages say so in plain words. What the CV can do is make each of them checkable.
9 min read
The usual assumption is that each country wants a different CV, so the evidence gets rewritten over and over. Read what the employment services themselves publish and the variable turns out to be much thinner than that — and it is not the part most people change.
11 min read
How this site works, what it does with your data, and how its content is produced.
Where an application asks you to upload supporting evidence, that upload is governed by instructions your CV never is — how much to include, what has to be removed first, which format, and whose information you are responsible for. One UK recruitment process states all four in writing, and the first is the opposite of how a CV works.
11 min read
The guides cover writing a CV end to end — structure, wording, formatting, and what changes by profession and country. Start there if you are writing one from scratch.
Read the CV guidesEach example works through a complete CV for one profession, including the conventions where the general advice does not hold.
Browse CV examplesPick a role-specific starting point, edit every section with a live preview, and export a text-based PDF.