How to write a CV

1. What a CV is, and what it is not

A CV is a factual record of your working life, arranged so a stranger can judge your fit for one specific job in under a minute. That is its whole job. It is not an autobiography, a personality profile, or a place to list every task you have ever been handed.

The word means different things in different countries, and this matters more than most guides admit. In the UK, Ireland, Australia and most of Europe, CV is the standard term for the one-to-two page document you send for any job. In the United States and Canada, that document is called a résumé, and "CV" is reserved for a much longer academic document listing publications, grants and conference talks. If you are applying across borders, use the local word for the local document. We cover the distinction in full in CV vs résumé.

One consequence of the American usage is worth stating plainly, because it trips up a lot of advice written for a US audience and read elsewhere: if the page you are reading defines a CV as a multi-page academic document, it is describing the American academic CV, and its length advice does not apply to the two-page document a UK or EU employer expects.

2. The seven sections, in order

Almost every effective CV is built from the same seven parts. The order below is the default; the only section that moves is the one you most want read first.

1. Contact details — name, one phone number, one email, city, and links that are relevant to the work.
2. Personal profile — two to four lines saying who you are professionally and what you are applying for.
3. Work experience — reverse chronological, each role with three to five achievement-led bullets.
4. Education — qualifications, institutions, dates. Brief once you have work history.
5. Skills — the specific, checkable ones the job asks for.
6. Projects or portfolio — optional, and the strongest section a career-changer or new graduate has.
7. Extras — certifications, languages, volunteering, publications — only where they earn their space.

If you have less than about two years of work history, move Education above Work experience. If you are changing field entirely, move Projects above Work experience, because your recent relevant work is more persuasive than the job you are leaving.

3. Writing each section

Contact details

Name at the top, larger than everything else. Then a phone number, a professional email address, and your city — not your full street address. Add a LinkedIn URL if it is current, and a portfolio, GitHub or personal site if the work is visible there.

Use an email address that is your name. An address like partygal92@ costs you nothing to change and can cost you a shortlist place. If your name is common, adding a middle initial helps the person searching for you later.

Leave off: date of birth, marital status, nationality, a headshot (outside the countries noted in the format section below), and your full postal address. None of it helps, and in the UK and US some of it creates a discrimination risk that a cautious employer will avoid by moving on.

Personal profile

Two to four lines, first person implied rather than stated, no "I am a hard-working individual". It answers three questions: what you are, how long you have been it, and what you are looking for now.

A weak version restates the job title. A strong version names the thing you are actually good at:

The strong version is not more impressive for its adjectives. It is more impressive because it says something a reader could disagree with, which means it says something at all.

Work experience

Reverse chronological — most recent first. For each role: job title, employer, location, and the dates. Then three to five bullets.

The single most common failure on a CV is a bullet that describes the job rather than the person doing it. "Responsible for managing social media accounts" describes a job description. It does not tell the reader whether you did it well, badly, or at all.

Dates: month and year is enough. "March 2023 – Present" is more useful than "2023 – Present". Gaps of a few months are normal and rarely questioned; a gap of two years will be asked about, so decide what you want to say before you are asked.

Education

Qualification, institution, and dates. Once you have a few years of experience, this becomes three lines at the bottom. While you are studying or newly graduated, it goes near the top and can carry a line about a relevant project, dissertation or result.

Grades are worth including when they are strong or when the employer asks. A degree classification below a 2:1 (or a GPA below about 3.0) is usually better left off than explained, unless the application specifically requires it.

Skills

List the skills the job actually asks for, using the words the job uses. If the posting says "stakeholder management" and you write "communicating with clients", a keyword search may not connect the two — and neither will a tired reader skimming for the phrase they wrote.

Be specific and be honest about level. "Python (5 years, pandas and Airflow)" tells a reader something. "Python — expert" invites a question you may not want. Do not list a skill you would not be comfortable being tested on in the first ten minutes of an interview.

Projects and portfolio

This is the section that rescues a CV with thin work history. A career-changer who built something real, a graduate who shipped a side project, a returner who kept a hand in — all of them are better served by one concrete project than by three paragraphs of transferable skills.

Give the project a name, one line on what it is, one line on what you did, and a link. If it is code, link the repository. If it is writing or design, link the work itself.

Extras

Languages with a honest proficiency level. Professional certifications with the awarding body and the year. Volunteering where it demonstrates a skill you are claiming. Publications and talks if your field cares about them.

Leave off hobbies unless they are genuinely relevant or genuinely distinctive — and "reading, travel and socialising" is neither. A line about running a marathon tells a reader you can finish something hard, but only if you connect it to something they care about, which most CVs never do.

4. Bullet points that work

Most CV advice stops at "use action verbs". That is not the hard part. The hard part is that a bullet needs a result, and most people do not remember their results because nobody asked them to at the time.

The structure that works, in order:

1. What you did — the action, specific enough to be checkable.
2. How — the method, tool or approach, only if it is interesting.
3. What changed — the outcome, with a number if one exists.

On numbers: use them where you have them, and do not invent them. An approximate, honestly-hedged figure ("roughly a third", "about 40 a month") reads as more credible than a suspiciously precise one, and it survives an interview question. If you genuinely cannot remember, describe the change in words — "cut the monthly close from nine days to four" is better than a number you made up, but "reduced the time taken to close the month" is still better than "responsible for month-end close".

This is the part of CV writing that takes the longest, and it is the part worth taking the longest over. Most CVs fail here, not in their layout.

5. Format rules that have not changed

Formatting advice dates quickly, so here is the part that does not: the format exists to survive two readers — a piece of software that parses your file, and a tired human who gives it a few seconds.

• One column. Two-column layouts are the most common cause of scrambled parsing, because the parser reads across both columns as though they were one line.
• No text in headers, footers, text boxes or tables for anything that matters. Many parsers drop them entirely.
• A standard font at 10–12pt, with real headings. Calibri, Arial, Helvetica, Georgia and Garamond are safe. Anything decorative is a gamble on the reader's machine.
• Dates as "Month YYYY", consistently, right-aligned or after the employer — not floated somewhere the parser will detach from the role.
• Spell out an acronym once, then use the short form: "applicant tracking system (ATS)".
• Save as PDF unless the employer asks for Word. If the application form asks for .docx, send .docx — some systems parse it better, and some large employers genuinely require it.
• Name the file properly: Firstname-Lastname-CV.pdf. Not cv final v3 (2).pdf.

Length: two pages is fine for most people with more than a few years of experience, and one page is right for early careers. The rule that matters is not the page count but whether every line earns its place. For the full version of this, including ATS parsing and country conventions, see CV format.

6. Tailoring it to the job

This is the highest-return hour you can spend on an application, and almost nobody does it properly.

Read the posting and mark every requirement it names — the explicit "you will need" list and the implicit ones buried in the description of the team. For each one, decide honestly which of three states you are in:

• Covered — you have a specific example. It goes on the CV, near the top of the relevant role.
• Partly — you have something adjacent. Say what you actually did rather than stretching the claim.
• Not yet — you do not have it. You can leave it out, or you can address it directly in a cover note. What you should not do is paper over it with confident language, because the interview is where that gets found out.

Then reorder. The bullets that answer the posting's first three requirements move to the top of their sections. Nothing is invented and nothing is deleted; the same facts are simply arranged so the reader finds the relevant ones first.

Two honest cautions. First, tailoring is not keyword stuffing — a CV that repeats the posting's phrases without the experience behind them reads as exactly what it is. Second, do not tailor so far that the document stops being true of you; you will have to defend every line of it in a room.

7. Ten mistakes that cost interviews

1. Duties instead of achievements. The most common failure by a wide margin.
2. One CV sent to everything. Cheap to fix, and the fix is the highest-return work available.
3. A profile full of adjectives. "Dynamic, results-driven professional" describes nobody.
4. A two-column layout. Looks good in a template gallery; scrambles in a parser.
5. Unexplained gaps or overlapping dates. Not fatal, but decide your answer before the interview.
6. Skills you cannot defend. Every listed skill is an invitation to be tested on it.
7. Typos in the first three lines. The reader decides fast, and the top of the page is where they decide.
8. Inconsistent tense and formatting. Past roles in past tense, current role in present. Same date format throughout.
9. No contact route that works. A dead phone number or an unread inbox ends the process silently.
10. Sending it as cv.pdf. Your name should be in the filename; a recruiter handles hundreds.

8. Checklist before you send

• Every bullet says what changed, not just what you were responsible for.
• Numbers are real, or honestly hedged, and you can explain each one.
• The first three requirements in the posting are answered in the top half of page one.
• One column, standard font, no text boxes, dates in Month YYYY.
• Name, phone, email and city are correct and current.
• Read aloud once — this catches the sentences that scan badly.
• Filename is Firstname-Lastname-CV.pdf.
• Opened on a phone to check it is legible there, because that is where many first reads happen.

Where Merit fits

Everything above is work you can do on your own, and if you have the material to hand, there is no reason not to. Merit exists for the part that is harder: most people cannot remember the specifics that make a CV good, because nobody wrote them down at the time.

Merit interviews you about the work behind the lines, keeps the facts you confirm in a private vault, and drafts a CV from that record rather than from a document you paste in. You confirm every fact before it is used, and you can export or delete the whole thing. One interview and one CV are free; after that it is $20 a month.

If you would rather do it yourself, that is a perfectly good answer — the checklist above is the whole method, and it costs nothing.

Keep reading

• CV format: layout, length and applicant tracking systems
• CV vs résumé: which one a given employer wants
• How to write a CV with no experience
• What is changing in CVs in 2026