How to write a CV, step by step

Step 1 — Collect the facts before you write anything

Open a plain document and list every job, course and certificate with its dates and the organisation's exact name. Do not write sentences yet. You are only making sure nothing is missing and no dates contradict each other, because an unexplained gap is far easier to fix now than after you have polished the prose around it.

Check the dates against your own records rather than memory. Employment dates that do not match a background check are a serious problem, and most people misremember by a month or two.

Step 2 — Write the experience section first

Not the personal statement. Your summary is a distillation of your experience, so writing it first means writing it blind — which is why so many CVs open with vague lines about being a hard-working team player.

For each role, write three to five bullet points. Start each with a verb: led, built, cut, negotiated, trained, launched. Then say what changed as a result.

• Weak: 'Was responsible for the social media accounts.'
• Better: 'Managed three social media accounts, growing the combined following from 4,000 to 11,000 in eight months.'
• Weak: 'Helped with training new staff.'
• Better: 'Trained 12 new joiners on the till system; average onboarding time fell from two weeks to four days.'

Step 3 — Now write the personal statement

With your experience on the page, the summary writes itself: it is the three or four most relevant things, compressed. Say who you are professionally, your strongest evidence, and what you are looking for.

Rewrite it for every application. It is four lines of work and it is the single highest-leverage edit you can make, because it is the part a recruiter reads before deciding whether to read the rest.

Step 4 — Fill in education, skills and languages

Put education below experience unless you graduated recently or are still studying, in which case it goes above. List qualifications newest first.

For skills, be specific and honest. A recruiter can test 'Excel (pivot tables, VLOOKUP)' in an interview; 'good with computers' says nothing and invites suspicion. If you list a language, be ready to be interviewed in it.

Step 5 — Cut it down

Read every line and ask whether it would make a stranger more likely to interview you. If not, delete it. Hobbies that could describe anyone — reading, music, travelling — take up room your achievements need. A specific interest that shows something real is a different matter.

Remove the heading 'Curriculum Vitae' if you have one. The reader knows what it is, and it wastes the most valuable line on the page.

Step 6 — Proofread it properly

Read it aloud. You will hear errors your eye skips, because your brain silently corrects text it wrote. Then read it backwards, last line to first, which breaks the flow enough to expose typos.

Then give it to one other person. Every CV has at least one mistake its author cannot see.

The mistakes that cost people interviews

• An unprofessional email address. Make a new one with your name in it. It takes two minutes.
• Writing in the third person. 'Ram is a dedicated professional' reads as though someone else wrote it about you. Use 'I', or drop the pronoun entirely.
• Dense paragraphs in the experience section. Nobody reads them. Use bullets.
• Lying. Dates, titles and qualifications are checked more often than people expect, and being caught ends the application immediately.
• Sending the same CV everywhere. Reordering your skills and rewriting your summary for each role takes ten minutes and changes your response rate more than anything else on this page.