1. Tailor the top third to the specific job
There is a reason generic CVs fail quietly: they force the reader to do the work of connecting your experience to their vacancy. Most readers will not bother. They will move on to the candidate who made the connection obvious.
You do not need to rewrite the whole document for every application. You need to rewrite the top third — your headline, your summary, and your first two or three bullet points. That is the region a recruiter actually reads before deciding whether to continue. If the job advert asks for stakeholder management and B2B pipeline experience, those exact phrases should appear above the fold, attached to something you genuinely did.
A practical method: open the job description in one window and your CV in the other. Highlight every noun and skill in the advert that appears more than once. Those are the employer's real priorities, whatever the rest of the text says. Make sure each one is either present in your top third or consciously dropped because you cannot honestly claim it.
2. Write outcomes, not job descriptions
Compare two lines describing the same job.
"Responsible for managing the company social media accounts and creating content."
"Grew combined social following from 4,000 to 31,000 in 14 months; the channel became the second-largest source of trial signups."
The first tells the reader your job title had duties attached, which they assumed. The second tells them what changed because you were there. Only one of those is evidence.
If you do not have clean numbers — and plenty of good work does not produce them — reach for scale, speed, or consequence instead. How many people, how much budget, how much faster than before, what happened next. "Rewrote the onboarding guide that four regional teams now use as standard" is a strong line with no percentage in it at all.
- Scale: headcount, budget, users, transactions, territory.
- Change: before and after, with the timeframe attached.
- Speed: how much time or cost you removed from a process.
- Consequence: what the organisation adopted, kept, or avoided because of your work.
3. Make it boring enough for the software to read
Most mid-size and large employers run applications through an applicant tracking system before a human sees them. These systems parse text. They are defeated by things designers love: multi-column layouts, text inside images, headers and footers, tables, icons standing in for words, and unusual fonts.
The safest structure is genuinely dull — a single column, standard section headings ("Experience", "Education", "Skills"), consistent dates in a consistent format, and a common typeface at 10 to 12 point. Send a PDF unless the employer explicitly asks for a Word file, and give the file a sensible name: your name, the role, the year.
This is not an argument for ugliness. Clean spacing, a clear hierarchy and restrained use of bold will make your CV look more professional than any template with a sidebar and a skills doughnut chart.
4. Open with a summary that says something
Personal statements have a bad reputation because most of them are filler. "A hardworking and motivated team player seeking a challenging new opportunity" describes roughly everyone who has ever applied for anything.
A useful summary does three things in three or four lines: names what you are, quantifies your depth, and points at the specific kind of role you want. "Supply chain analyst, six years across FMCG and pharma, focused on demand forecasting. Cut stockouts 22% at my current employer. Looking for a planning role with regional scope." A reader knows immediately whether to keep going.
If you cannot write that sentence about yourself, it is usually a sign you have not decided what you are applying for. That is worth resolving before you send anything.
5. Respect the two-page limit
Length is not a measure of seniority; relevance is. Two pages is enough for almost everyone, and one page is often better early in a career. Academic CVs and some senior executive profiles are the genuine exceptions.
The way to cut is not to shrink the font. It is to be ruthless about age and relevance. Your last two roles deserve real detail. Roles from ten years ago deserve a line each. The Saturday job deserves nothing at all once you have a degree or two real positions behind you.
Also worth deleting: references available on request (assumed), full home address (a city is plenty and safer), date of birth and marital status (irrelevant, and in many countries employers would rather not see them), and any skill so basic it is faintly embarrassing to claim, like email.
6. Use the employer's vocabulary
Different industries and even different companies use different words for identical work. One firm's "client services" is another's "account management" is another's "customer success". If the software is scanning for one phrase and you have used a synonym, you can be screened out despite being a perfect fit.
Mirror the language of the advert where it is honest to do so. If they say "stakeholder engagement" and you have been writing "working with the business", change it. This is not gaming the system; it is translating your experience into the reader's dialect.
What you should not do is stuff keywords you cannot defend. Anything on your CV is fair game in an interview, and being caught out on a skill you listed is far worse than never listing it.
7. Proofread in the right order
Everyone tells you to proofread. Fewer people tell you what to check first, so here is the order that matters.
Start with your contact details. A transposed digit in a phone number or a typo in an email address means the process ends and you never find out why. Then check dates for gaps and overlaps you have not explained. Then check company and product names, because misspelling the employer you are applying to is uniquely fatal. Only then worry about commas.
Read the whole thing aloud — your ear catches clumsy phrasing your eye slides past. Then get one other person to read it. Not to be kind, but to tell you which line they did not understand.
8. Keep it current, not just when you need it
The worst time to write your CV is the week you urgently need one. Detail decays fast: within a year you will have forgotten the exact figure, the name of the framework, the size of the team.
Keep a plain running document — call it a brag file if you like — and add to it whenever something goes well. The project that shipped, the number your manager quoted in a review, the thing a client said in an email. It takes two minutes and it turns CV writing from an act of archaeology into an act of editing.
It has a second benefit. When your annual review comes round, or when you decide to ask for a raise, you will already have the evidence assembled.