How to write a CV that gets you the job

Your CV is your shop window and is the first opportunity you have to impress a hiring manager or recruiter with your career history, skills and experience.

Please continue reading to find out how to write an outstanding CV, together with advice on what you should include and what to avoid.

How long should my CV be?

The normal length for a CV is two pages. Many people will tell you that this is a hard and fast rule for everyone but there are some exceptions.

For example, a Graduate CV should be a single page document, while CVs in certain sectors (e.g. academia, medicine) may be longer. However, even these should not exceed three pages.

Hiring managers and recruiters see a lot of CVs every day, so anything longer is unlikely to even be read.

What should be included in my CV?

Contact details

Your name, mobile number and email address. You do not need to include your full address, date of birth or a photo.

Executive Summary

Right at the top of page one should be a short paragraph which gives the reader a brief overview of your main skills. You may also consider including up to four brief bullet points which pick out some of your major achievements or attributes in order to differentiate yourself from other competing candidates. The whole Executive Summary should not take up more than a quarter of the first page.

Education and Professional Qualifications

All of your educational and professional qualifications should be listed, with the most recent mentioned first. There is no need to list internal courses or online studies you may have undertaken as these are very unlikely to help you secure your next role.

Please note that Education is best placed at the bottom of a CV for candidates with more than five years of work experience. For those of you with less than five years, then place this section under the Executive Summary.

Career History

You should list your work experience in reverse order, starting with your current or most recent role. It is important to include the name of the company, your job title and the dates of employment as a minimum, before then listing your key achievements, duties and responsibilities.

Please think about the format of each section. Make good use of bullet points to break your experience into manageable, easily understood statements and avoid generating big, unreadable blocks of text.

Additional Information

This is where you can list other relevant data, such as foreign language or IT skills you possess. Make sure that anything you do list is real; for example, there is no point putting a language on your CV if your level is not good enough to use it in a business context.

Most CVs do not benefit from having outside interests listed. Unless you have something which is either a real talking point or which is going to be a genuine benefit in your next role, there is no value in adding it to your CV.

What is the best format for a CV?

Use a simple, clean Word format with either Calibri or Arial as your font. Font size should be between 10.5 and 12 but must be the same throughout the document.

Include section titles or headings to ensure that the reader can find the relevant part of the CV. These should be in bold, underlined or in a larger font to make them stand out.

Make sure a reader can quickly find what they want to see by using bullet points to break your experience into individual achievements.

Lead each bullet point with a success or achievement, using active verbs such as ‘devised’, ‘designed’, ‘achieved’, ‘secured’ or ‘created’. If you can add context in terms of specific numbers to frame the success, then make sure you use them.

Review everything in the CV. Check for spelling and grammatical mistakes using spell check or ask a friend you trust to assist you. Make sure you are spell checking consistently in either US or British English.

Align the borders on both the left- and right-hand side of the page as this makes the document look neat and tidy.

If you would welcome a confidential conversation with a CV Writer, please call Mercury Coaching on +44 (0) 20 3633 1549