Anyone who has sat down and stared at their screen in an attempt to document their career history knows how difficult writing a CV/resume actually is. However, taking the time to write a strong CV/resume is so important. Not only will it get you noticed, but it will leave a prospective employer wanting to know more about your skills and experience.
Your CV/resume is your first chance to make an impression on the recruiter. Don’t forget to tailor each application you submit to the opportunity you are applying for, using the job description to customize the content.
In this guide, we will take you through the best ways to prepare a CV/resume: what you should include, what works and – most importantly – what doesn’t.
Writing a CV/resume can be a daunting prospect, whether you're experienced in an industry or looking for a career change, but it doesn’t have to be. Our definitive guide will show you how to write a CV/resume the right way.
What Are the Differences Between a CV and a Resume?
The easiest way to distinguish a CV from a resume is by the length and content:
CVs
Broadly speaking, a CV will be used when applying for jobs of a scientific nature.
Perhaps you’re applying to be a research assistant or you want to work in medicine or academia.
The term Curriculum Vitae is Latin for ‘course of life’. Therefore, it’s based on your credentials.
If you are asked to submit a CV, you are being asked to demonstrate:
- Your educational achievements
- Any certificates of recognition
- Professional memberships and affiliations, etc.
Resume
In contrast, a resume is looking at your capabilities. It is an opportunity for you to describe your skills and attributes, as well as any personal achievements.
Your resume is more about your work history, so it’s an opportunity for you to showcase:
- Where you have worked
- What experience you gained
- How you can use that experience to help you in a new role
How Long Should a CV Be?
A CV can be at least three or four pages long as it contains detailed information about your academic background. However, more commonly it is between one or two, for the UK a maximum of two pages.
A resume is shorter than a CV (typically one or two pages); this is because it needs to be a concise overview of your career history.
What Is a CV/Resume? An International Perspective
If you use Google to search for ‘What is a CV?’ or ‘How to write a successful CV' you will find an array of information available at your fingertips.
However, it’s important to consider the international perspective.
As a terminology, the phrase ‘CV’ is used all around the world, but each country uses ‘CV’ differently, which could impact on what content you include.
For example, in the UK, Ireland and New Zealand, CVs are used to encapsulate work history as well as academic achievements. They generally just use one document and don’t have specific resumes in the same way as the US.
In countries such as Australia and South Africa, the words ‘CV’ or ‘resume’ can be used interchangeably to mean the same thing.
In today’s global environment, if you are applying to work for an international firm, it’s wise to check what that company means when they ask for a CV or resume to ensure that you are providing the necessary documents.
What Do Employers Look for in a CV/Resume?
Your CV/resume should present a clear, concise and powerful summary of your skills, experience, knowledge and achievements, and be tailored to a specific employment opportunity.
Recruiters are busy people, so convey your most important skills and competencies as succinctly as possible, and in no more than two pages. Three pages is acceptable if you have a long career history.
What an Employer Will Be Looking For
When a recruiter picks up your CV/resume they need to be immediately engaged. To make a strong first impression, your CV/resume will need to communicate several important pieces of information:
Achievements – Don’t just list your duties and responsibilities. Take the opportunity to highlight what you have achieved in the role. Use examples relevant to the job you are applying for that paint a picture of a competent and skilled professional.
Experience – Recruiters will often scan CVs/resumes to select candidates with the right kind of experience. Communicate the value you can bring through your employment history and make your relevant experience stand out.
Skills – Highlight relevant skills acquired throughout your career history. Your skills should underpin your experience and demonstrate your suitability for the job.
Results – A recruiter loves to see results. If you have exceeded your targets in sales, achieved a huge performance increase on a campaign, or increased leads, performance or conversions, then be sure to include this on your CV/resume. Use statistics, percentages and numbers as much as possible to quanitfy your experience.
What to Avoid
Unfamiliar formatting – The last thing that a busy recruiter wants to see when they have hundreds of CVs/resumes to sift through is an unfamiliar format. It can take much longer to find the required information. Always follow traditional CV/resume formatting. More about formatting is explained in the next section.
Too much information – Don’t include your school grades when you have a master’s degree and avoid listing every job you have ever held or every technology you have ever used. These will take up valuable space. Every piece of information on your CV/resume should add value. It is recommended that more experienced candidates cover their employment for the last 10 years. For graduates, be selective about the jobs that you include based on the opportunity you are applying for. Including details about a summer placement in retail, for example, isn’t going to add much value if you are applying for a graduate opportunity in IT.
Writing in the first person – Always use the third person when writing a CV/resume. Using the first person comes across as unprofessional.
Endless lists – Never simply add an endless list of duties (or, even worse, copy and paste your job description). Recruiters will find it much more interesting to learn what impact you had. So, instead of describing how you managed a filing system, say you ‘Increased efficiency by effective management of a paper-based/electronic filing system.’ This has much more impact. Using action verbs can also help highlight your direct impact within a role.
Your CV/resume is there to sell your skills and experience to potential employers and helps answer the question: “Why should I employ this person?”. It should provide a brief introduction to your key skills and experiences and highlight how you are suitable for the job you are applying for.
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How to Format and Present Your CV/Resume
Employers see a lot of CVs/resumes and there are likely to be many suitably qualified candidates for any given role. Making your CV/resume stand out is key to securing the all-important interview, and it is really worth spending time on.
Be sure to:
Keep it brief – Aim for a maximum of two sides of A4, unless you have a particularly long career history. A single page is perfectly acceptable for graduates.
Use good formatting – Use a common font like Ariel or Times New Roman, and a font size of 11 or 12. Ensure that there is plenty of white space on your page, as it will be easier to skim the document for key information. You can achieve this with standard margins, line spacing at 1.15pt and gaps between paragraphs. Don’t be tempted to try to cram too much information into a single document, since if it's hard to read then employers may not bother.
Use clear and engaging language – This means being concise, avoiding jargon and using active words like ‘leading’, ‘achieving’ and ‘delivering’.
Decide how best to order the information – You may choose to format your resume in chronological order (with your most recent first), or you could choose to list the most relevant experience at the top of the page. Consider what information is most important to the role you are applying for. If education is the key criteria, then open with your grades and academic accomplishments. If commercial experience is most important, lead with this and include education beneath.
Choose the right software - Most CVs/resumes are created using Microsoft Word, but there is other software you can use to create a professional design, such as Adobe InDesign. Remember to publish your CV/resume in a document that can be widely opened by recruiters. If they can’t open your CV/resume because it’s in an unrecognisable file format they may move on to the next without reading yours. We recommend that you publish the CV/resume in a PDF or Word document. If in doubt, ask the recruiter what file format they prefer.
Curriculum Vitae (CV) – What You Need to Know
A CV is used to describe your entire career history. It’s designed to showcase your credentials. For example:
- Academic achievements
- Professional knowledge
- Details (if applicable) of any published work and/or teaching expertise
You should continually update your CV whenever you achieve anything professionally as it is a comprehensive record of your achievements.
As your CV is a detailed academic document, there are a few things that should always be included within your CV.
These include:
- Academic qualifications (including details of your grades and your chosen major)
- Certificates of achievement
- Conferences and seminars that you’ve attended
- Languages
- Non-academic activities
- Professional memberships or affiliations
- Published work and/or dissertations (remember to cite them correctly)
- Research grants
- Research interests
- Research projects (including brief details of aims and outcomes)
- Training courses
As you can see, it’s a comprehensive list. It is no wonder that CVs tend to be considerably longer than your resume.
What to Include in Your CV/Resume
It is important that your CV/resume contains enough of the right information for the employer to feel that you are a good fit for the role. There are a number of key sections which most CVs/resumes contain, and we’ll explore these below.
Personal Details
You must display key personal details clearly on your CV/resume, so the employer can contact you. However, this is not information that the employer will be using to assess your suitability for the role, so don't use too much space for it.
Name – Your name should be the title of your CV/resume and should be in bold letters at the top. If your CV/resume has more than one page, have your name on both, just in case they get separated.
Address – Make sure that your CV/resume has your address on it, including your postcode. Think about how you want to present your address and how much space this takes. Consider the examples below – which demonstrates the best use of space?
18 Random Road
Town
County
Postcode
or
18 Random Road │ Town │ County │ Postcode
Email – Your email address should be on your CV/resume. This is often the primary way employers contact candidates. Make sure that the email address you provide is sensible and professional – if the email address you usually use is jokey or risqué, set up another email address for professional correspondence. An email address that starts with ‘drunkendancer’ isn’t going to make a good first impression.
Telephone – Include a telephone number. If you have a voicemail service for that number, take the time to record a personalised greeting. Again, keep it professional. A good message would be: “Hello, this is the voicemail for John Smith. I can't get to the phone right now but if you leave your name, number and a short message I’ll get back to you as soon as possible.”
Social media – Some people like to include details of their social media accounts. This can work well as long as they are professional; for example, a Twitter account where you regularly tweet on professional subjects. Accounts like these demonstrate that you are interested in and engaged with the topic and this can be beneficial to your application. If, on the other hand, your tweets are mainly photos of your friends or politicised statements, it’s best not to mention this account on your CV/resume. Including a link to your LinkedIn profile is a good idea but you might want to avoid drawing attention to your Facebook account (and even if you do, you may want to change your privacy settings).
Nationality – As a rule, it’s best not to include your nationality; a caveat to this is if you require a visa to work in the UK (in which case you might also want to say what work your visa allows you to do).
Personal Statement
It's good practice to start your CV/resume with either a resume objective, statement of qualifications or a personal statement. This is your opportunity to sell yourself in your own words.
Clearly explain how you meet the requirements of the role while demonstrating your enthusiasm for the opportunity.
Avoid vague statements such as, “driven with great commercial skills”, as you are providing no evidence that this is the case.
Instead, deliver factual information that illustrates your skills, for example:
Top-ranked salesperson in xx organisation, delivering sales worth over £10 million in 2017.
Make sure that the examples you use are relevant to the role and organisation you are applying for.
One or two sentences that convey a slice of your personality, the reasons for your career choices and why you are suitable for the position will separate your CV/resume from the pile of others that begin with the bland, “During my time at X I was responsible for...”
Work Experience
One of the most important jobs of a CV/resume is to summarise your previous relevant work experience. You should start with your most recent role and work backwards.
For each role, include:
Dates to and from – This is important because it enables a potential employer to see how long you stayed with your previous employer, and also to spot any gaps in employment they might want to explore with you. If you have many short-term jobs (e.g. through temping), explain why or the employer may assume that you are not someone who sticks with things. If you have any breaks in your career history (e.g. a gap year), explain it and say what you learned from it.
Name of the company (plus a brief explanation of what they do) – This plays two main roles: first, it can be used by the employer to check your references; second, it can help the employer understand more about the kind of organisation you worked for. For example, if you worked in a large multinational restaurant chain, your experience of the workplace is likely to be different than if you worked in a small local restaurant.
Your role and a summary of your key responsibilities – This explains what you did. Keep it brief and assume that most people are broadly familiar with what most roles do. If you managed people, mention how many. If you had budgetary responsibility, mention the size of the budget.
Key achievements and successes in the role – This is your opportunity to sell what you did in the role, especially if it was over and above what might be expected. Try to identify three or four achievements for each role and ensure they are relevant to the job you are applying for. Where possible, try to quantify the benefit to the organisation, for example, “Identified an opportunity for insulating pipework leading to energy savings of £23,000 per year.”
You can have a distinct section on a CV for volunteering which is laid out similar to the work experience section with, organisation name, role, dates and description of responsibilities.
Qualifications and Education
It is important to include a section in your CV/resume which illustrates your key skills and qualifications; the more relevant they are to the role, the better. List qualifications or courses undertaken with the name of the training provider and the dates. Be honest as these may be checked.
The qualifications section does not have to be exhaustive. Ask yourself if the qualification is relevant to the role. If it isn’t, you probably don’t need to include it. If you are a member of any (relevant) professional bodies, then include them here. It will demonstrate a deeper level of credibility and engagement with your career.
If you speak other languages, have particular IT or project management skills, or have achieved any particular levels of professional recognition, such as chartership, then mention it in this section.
Extra Curricular
Your CV/resume should paint a picture of you as a person and your hobbies and interests can provide an insight into your personality.
Your hobbies can demonstrate additional skills and differentiate your CV/resume from other candidates. It can also show ways you are actively involved in the community or in voluntary projects, which you can talk about further during the interview.
That being said, hobbies are often subjective; some recruiters love them and others feel they are unimportant. Generally, an employer would only be interested in your hobbies if they are relevant to the role.
If you do decide to include them, place them at the end of your CV/resume. There are lots of CV/resume examples and CV/resume templates online, so use these for inspiration.
What Not to Include in Your CV/Resume
Give the employer all the information they need to make an informed decision but don’t waste space with information they don’t need.
There is no need to include the following information on a CV/resume:
- Date of birth/age – It is now illegal to discriminate against someone on the basis of their age.
- Marital status – Employers don't need to know this.
- Photo – Unless this is relevant for the role (for example, you are applying to be a model).
- Religion or ethnicity – A potential employer does not need to know about your religion and/or ethnicity.