What to Include in a CV

A CV is skimmed before it is read. Recruiters describe spending a few seconds deciding whether to keep going, and everything below is about surviving those seconds and then rewarding the person who did keep reading.

The five sections that earn their place

1. Name and role. Your name, and directly under it the job you do - not a slogan. "Senior Product Designer" tells a reader more than "Creative problem solver".
2. Contact details. Email, phone, city. A full street address is unnecessary and, on a document you email to strangers, unwise.
3. Profile. Two or three lines on what you do and the kind of problem you work on. This is the only part of a CV where you get to set the frame, so it is worth more drafts than it usually gets.
4. Experience. Role, employer, dates, then what you actually achieved. Most CVs list duties here; duties are what the job description said, achievements are what you did with it.
5. Education and skills. Brief. Once you have five years of work behind you, your degree is a line, not a section.

Write achievements, not duties

"Responsible for the payments flow" tells a reader nothing that your job title did not. "Rebuilt the payments flow, cutting failed transactions by a third" tells them what changed because you were there. Where you have a number, use it; where you do not, describe the outcome rather than the task.

What to leave out

• Date of birth, marital status, nationality. Not required, and in several countries employers are advised not to look at them.
• A photograph - unless you are applying in a market where it is expected. More on this below.
• References available on request. Everyone assumes this. It is a line of space you could spend on an achievement.
• Skill rating bars. A bar showing you at 80% of something communicates nothing measurable, and takes the room a real example would use.

The software reads it before a person does

Most large employers put every CV through applicant tracking software first, and it is worth knowing what that software is and is not good at. It reads a single column of text reliably. It reads two columns less reliably, because it cannot always tell which column comes first. It cannot read a photograph of a CV at all.

• One column beats two for anything submitted through an online form. Keep the sidebar layouts for a CV you are handing over in person or attaching to a direct email.
• Send text, not a picture. Print to PDF rather than downloading a PNG - the PDF keeps your words as words. This is the single most common way a good CV disappears without a reply.
• Use the ordinary section headings. "Work Experience", "Education", "Skills". A heading like "Where I have made a difference" is invisible to software looking for the standard ones.
• Put dates in a consistent format and keep them beside the role rather than in a margin.

None of this means a plain CV. It means the structure stays simple while the typography does the work - which is what the layouts here are built around.

The photograph question

This one genuinely depends on where you are applying. In Pakistan, the Gulf, and much of Asia and continental Europe a photo on a CV is normal and its absence can look odd. In the UK, US, Canada, Australia and Ireland it is discouraged - employers there avoid documents that could later support a discrimination claim, and some recruiters strip photos before passing a CV on.

If you are applying in more than one of those markets, keep two versions. Our CV templates leave the photo off, which is the safer default of the two.

Length

One page under ten years of experience, two beyond it. If you are fighting the page, cut your oldest roles to a single line each before you shrink the type - a CV set in seven point tells a reader you had more to say than you could edit.

The one exception is an academic post, where the document is expected to run long and list every publication. That is a different document wearing the same name, which is the whole of CV versus resume.