How to Write a CV
4 min read·Updated 4 Nov 2025
A CV is read in two passes. The first takes about eight seconds and decides whether there will be a second. In that first pass a reader is checking three things: are you roughly the right level, do you have the thing the advert asked for, and is there anything obviously wrong. Everything else — the careful wording, the achievements you are proudest of — is only read if those three questions get the right answers.
That has a straightforward consequence for how you build the document. The top third of the first page has to do the work. Whatever a reader needs to place you goes there: your name, what you do, and either a short summary or, if your recent role is the strongest argument, your most recent job.
This guide covers the structure that works for most people applying for most jobs. Academic and clinical CVs follow different conventions and are covered separately.
The sections a CV needs
A CV needs fewer sections than most people put on one. The following five cover the great majority of applications, and anything beyond them should earn its place:
- Personal details — name, phone, email, and the city you live in. Not your full address, not your date of birth, not your marital status.
- Professional summary — three or four lines positioning you for this role. Optional, but useful once you have a few years of experience.
- Work experience — reverse chronological, most recent first, with achievements rather than duties.
- Education — degree, institution, dates, and classification if it helps you.
- Skills — grouped, specific, and honest.
Getting the order right
The default order is summary, experience, education, skills. Two situations change it.
If you are a recent graduate or still studying, education moves above experience, because it is the strongest thing you have. Once you have two or three years of relevant work, it moves back down — a hiring manager stops caring about your degree classification long before you stop being proud of it.
If you are in a field where the toolkit is the first filter — software, data, anything with a specific technology stack — a compact skills block above experience saves the reader hunting for it. Keep it tight: five or six grouped lines, not a wall of thirty items.
Writing experience that says something
This is where most CVs fall down, and the failure is almost always the same one: describing the job rather than what you did in it. A job description is a list of things the role involves. A CV entry should be a list of things you achieved while doing them.
The practical test is whether a colleague in the same role could have written your bullet point word for word. If they could, it describes the job, not you.
Weak
Responsible for managing the social media accounts and creating content.
Stronger
Grew the LinkedIn following from 2,400 to 11,000 over eighteen months by shifting from daily reposts to two long-form posts a week, which became the source of about a third of inbound enquiries.
The second names the change, the timeframe, the decision behind it, and what the business got out of it. It is also much harder to fake, which is why it is believed.
How much detail per role
Weight the page towards the recent and the relevant. Your current or most recent role can take four to six bullet points. The one before it, three or four. Anything more than about eight years old usually needs one line, or can be collapsed into a short "earlier career" block with job titles and dates only.
This is also the answer to running over length. Most people who cannot fit onto two pages are giving equal space to a job from 2014 and a job from last year.
Things to leave off
- A photo, unless you are applying somewhere it is conventional — much of continental Europe expects one, the UK, Ireland and the United States do not.
- Date of birth, marital status, nationality and religion. In many countries employers actively do not want this information.
- Your full postal address. City and country is enough, and it is what a recruiter actually needs.
- "References available on request." Everyone knows. It is a wasted line.
- Skill bars, star ratings and percentage proficiency. They mean nothing precise and parse as nothing at all.
- An objective statement about what you want, unless you are changing career and need to explain the pivot.
Before you send it
- Read it aloud. Anything you stumble over is a sentence that needs rewriting.
- Check every date. Overlapping or impossible dates are noticed and are hard to explain away.
- Open every link. A dead portfolio link is worse than no link.
- Save as PDF, not a word processor document, unless the advert asks otherwise.
- Name the file properly: your name and the role, not "CV final v3".
- Read the advert once more and check that the words it uses appear somewhere on your CV, where they are true.
Questions
Should I write in the first person?
Do I need a different CV for every application?
How do I explain a gap?
Put this into practice
The editor keeps your CV as structured content, so the section order and wording decisions in this guide are easy to apply and easy to change again.