Step 3: How to write the perfect CV
As you will certainly have realised by now, there’s a reason this isn’t the first chapter of the book. So, if you skipped ahead, go back. Ask the others if you don’t believe me. You are doing it wrong.
The CV, while important, is not the pièce de résistance we make it out to be. For as long as I’ve been billing myself as a career coach, and for long before that, people have been coming to me for CV editing help. These people come to me in a frenzy, desperately seeking … I don’t know, some single PDF attachment to rule them all?
Friend, your job search success hangs on so much more than a single email attachment. I know how tempting it can be to treat your CV as a permanent record of your accomplishments, but it’s actually a lot more fluid than that. Your CV is nothing more than an ever-changing sales pitch, tailored to one specific employer at a time. Similarly to how you’d think to tweak your opening pickup line at the bar a little bit for every individual, you need to learn to tweak your CV for every employer you approach. You are the only one who controls your professional narrative, and you get to reserve the right to change how you talk about your skills and career history at any time. Your skillset changes over the years, and so will the ways in which you connect the dots about your previous employers. How you explained yourself on a CV last year might not make sense anymore. I promise you, no one is going to submit you to a lie-detector test and demand to see a transcript of everything you did at every previous role you ever held. Your future employer simply wants to understand a few highlights, and why those particular highlights are relevant.
What I can offer you: a narrative structure that should help you to highlight your talents effectively. Great copywriting tips. Ways to stand out. Proven techniques for painting the clearest possible picture of you and your strengths.
WHO WILL THIS CV FORMAT WORK FOR?
Meh, everybody-ish. While this format will work like a charm for those with four or more years of experience, it was explicitly designed to also work well for those who have only had internships or part-time jobs so far. And if you’re even more junior than that — perhaps you haven’t left school yet and you’re applying for your first Saturday job or internship ever! — you can exchange the Experience section for a Leadership & Activities section. The way you should speak about your relevant experience should remain the same, whether you’re talking about a salaried role or a student government position. If you are nervous about whether or not your official work experience is ‘good enough’, please give this a chance.
When writing a CV, I always want you to be thinking about …
My first portfolio featured, almost exclusively, work that ‘shouldn’t count’. I was trying to score a junior social media management job, and the person who ultimately became my boss asked me if I had any experience running social media accounts. ‘I run my own Facebook page, actually,’ I said in our initial meeting. ‘I mean, it’s a really tiny project, it’s just for my music. I use it to promote my gigs, tell people about my new recordings, stuff like that.’
To my amazement, he said that sounded great and wanted to see examples. I went home, screenshotted the best of those Facebook posts, and put them up online next to the few pieces of work that I had to show from my one ‘legitimate’ internship. I screenshotted a couple of posts from my Twitter and my SoundCloud that felt relevant, too. I got the job.
Just because you’re not getting paid doesn’t mean you’re not getting valuable experience. It’s not against the rules to talk about this kind of work on your CV or during your job search. Relevant experience is always, always, always valid.
Your new CV structure
YOUR NAME
+44 (0) XXXXXXX · hello@gmail.com · Twitter: @alexashoen · Portfolio: www.myportfolio.com
SKILLS & QUALIFICATIONS
Skill (X years) Skill (X years)
Skill (X years) Skill (X years)
Skill (X years) Skill (X years)
Skill (X years) Skill (X years)
NICE TO MEET YOU, EMPLOYER!
Hi, I’m Alexa. I’m a copywriter, creative director, and digital marketing specialist. I work across a lot of different mediums, but it always comes back to the same thing: I’m obsessed with clarity, creativity, the user journey, and comms as a retention tool.
EXPERIENCE
Company Name ∙ Town/City, Country
Your Job Title ∙ Month 20XX–Present
Limit yourself to 3–4 bullet points per company, with the most impressive bullet point at the top
Company Name ∙ Town/City, Country
Your Job Title ∙ Month 20XX–Present
Limit yourself to 3–4 bullet points per company, with the most impressive bullet point at the top
EDUCATION
University Name ∙ Town/City, Country
Course name and result ∙ Graduation date
The Contact section
Always remember that a CV is only starting its journey the moment you hit send. Your PDF is likely headed into a tracking system of some kind, somewhere, so it needs to stand on its own two feet. To illustrate: you might have emailed your application to a recruiter, but you still need to include your email address on the CV so that their colleague knows how to find you if they stumble across this document in a digital folder five weeks from now.
When I say a CV is a fluid document, I mean that even your contact information can change slightly depending on the types of jobs you want. Keep it on the simpler side for the more formal industries (like banking, healthcare, or insurance). For more informal or creative environments, you can and should use the Contact section strategically. Include your Instagram handle, link to your personal website, don’t be afraid to show off the things that make you you.
My entire career, I’ve applied to jobs which require strong writing skills. I know that any sentence I write — on my CV, in an email, on Twitter, wherever — is a writing sample for a potential employer to judge. When it comes to how I live my life online, I am conscious of this. When it comes to my contact section, I have always included social media handles and a link to my portfolio. I’m charming and articulate online. I want my future co-workers to see that side of me. I want them to assess my work based on this additional information. The way I see it, I am just making it easy for them to find what they will probably go creeping for on their own anyway.
Make these decisions for yourself on a job-by-job basis. You have to gauge the formality level of the company, and adapt each CV specifically for that situation. Perhaps that sounds like overkill when we haven’t even got past the Contact section yet. The trick is to remember throughout this entire process that there are no set-in-stone rules.
TIP
When was the last time you got any mail from a potential employer, unless it was an official contract you were about to sign because you got the job? And in that case, they’re going to email you to confirm your mailing address anyway, because this is not 1974. Don’t worry about putting your physical address on your CV just because you heard you were supposed to, especially if you are planning to relocate. Save the space for something that matters.
Skills & Qualifications
I love this section, and I put it right at the top of any CV I touch. Why? This is your TL;DR executive summary moment. Effectively, you’re BuzzFeed-ifying your CV.
You should be able to read your own CV with the same ease that you can read an internet listicle on The 14 Reasons Why Friends Will Always Be the Greatest Sitcom of All Time. You’ve likely heard the same crazy fact I have: that recruiters spend something like eight seconds on your application before making a decision. Your CV needs to be skimmable. Give hiring managers the hard facts they’re looking for right off the bat, in the most easy-to-digest way possible. With the skills section, you get the chance to highlight 8–12 of your most tangible skills immediately. You get to spell out exactly what you can offer, instead of asking recruiters to read between the lines and figure out whether any of your past experience is helpful for them.
SKILLS & QUALIFICATIONS
Social media content and scheduling (2.5 years)
Copy for physical packaging (2.5 years)
Online community management (2.5 years)
Public relations & press writing (5 years)
Copy/concepting for advertising (5 years)
SEO-driven content creation (1.5 years)
Copywriting for mobile/in-app (1.5 years)
Startup savvy: Berlin, San Fran (2.5 years)
Spanish B2 proficiency (5+ years)
Learning A2 German (an ongoing mission)
If you’re an expert in Adobe Photoshop or InDesign, for example, you would put that here if it’s relevant to the job you’re applying for. A long time ago, it was traditional to put your skills at the bottom of your CV, where you would half-heartedly mention that you knew both Apple and PC operating systems and felt comfortable using Microsoft Excel. We’ve moved so far past that. If you work on a computer day-to-day, you obviously know how to use a computer and create a Word doc.
Highlight the things you know. List the technical programs you’re familiar with (like writing code in C++ or sending out newsletters with MailChimp), as well as the less tangible offline skills (facilitating 30-person workshops or your experience teaching children with disabilities). You could also use this opportunity to showcase leadership stuff (like how you’re the on-site lead for a four-person team in a shop).
Yes, you’ll reiterate this stuff further down the page and give more context. At the end of the day, people just want to know whether or not you’ve got the skills to do the job you say you want. Try to keep the skills short and sweet, four to five words apiece. Skimmable.
TIP
This section can be flexible, too. Reorder the skills as needed. Put the most relevant skills for that particular position right at the top.
It’s Nice To Meet You (optional)
Good/bad news: in my experience, up to 50% of recruiters don’t read, or even open, your cover letter. I know, it’s annoying. You’ll probably still have to write one anyway for a ton of positions for the next decade while employers figure their stuff out. But instead of wasting time getting frustrated, look for opportunities to work around the quirks of the system.
If your CV needs to operate as a stand-alone opportunity to impress whoever is reading it, this Nice To Meet You section acts as a way to sneakily add a micro-sized cover letter, to set the narrative for everything else on the page. And it might just be the only shot you get.
WARNING
This is not the same as those silly Objective sections where you’re supposed to write that you’re looking for a job that can utilise your unique skillset. That often ends up being wasted space.
The goal of this lightweight ‘elevator pitch’ section is simply to make your CV come to life and get noticed — as if you yourself could magically reach through the computer screen, say hello, make a little polite small talk, shake some hands. Look, recruiters will always notice somebody with good manners. People instinctively want to hire the people they’d be willing to get stuck in traffic with — for better or worse. Whenever you get stressed out during this process, close your eyes and remember (again) that you’re just trying to introduce yourself to a human being. Your introduction should be two to three lines long.
Hello, Facebook London!
I’m Alexa, and I’m a senior UX copywriter/communication designer/content strategist/whatever we’re calling ‘us’ this week. I specialise in collaborating with designers at B2C companies like Zalando, Rocket Internet, and GetYourGuide.
Let’s take this real example from my past and break it down. I’ll highlight how I’m approaching this section, and why it’s different to the dumb old-fashioned objective thing.
Hello, Facebook London!
Go ahead and shamelessly add their name right in the header. Nice to meet you, Facebook. Nice to meet you, United Nations. Nice to meet you, Hearst. The recruiter will do a double take, I guarantee it. You know how people say the sound of your own name is the most beautiful sound in the world? This is the professional equivalent of that. If all you get is those eight seconds, you need to use every minor attention-to-detail trick you can in order to hook someone’s attention. Simple and stupid as it may seem, popping the employer’s name into the header will immediately make a recruiter stop and think: Wow, nice touch. They really meant to send this CV to us. We’re not just another copy-and-paste job, they actually know they’re applying to work for our team.
You are going to customise your CV for every employer (yes, you are), so you might as well spend the extra few minutes to do it correctly. Employers really aren’t used to people going the extra mile and creating a CV specifically tailored to the right company and role. It’s these last-mile touches that will get you noticed.
I’m Alexa
If you’re looking at this elevator pitch and thinking, I have no idea what I’m going to write here, just start by introducing yourself the same way you would in person or on the phone. Be friendly, be yourself, be honest, be as natural as you can be. Here’s what a forgettable introduction would look like:
Junior customer service manager seeking opportunity to use my customer service management skills to improve customer satisfaction.
That’s a missed opportunity. Somebody who wants to work in customer service should be warm, friendly, and passionate about making people happy. The goal is to show people who you are, not just tell them.
I’m Thomas: a junior customer service manager in the Cambridge area. I feel accomplished when I see happy customer emails in my inbox, and I know how important consistent service is to a growing company like [Company Name].
If you’re worried about not having enough specialist knowledge or experience, try using this section to tell people who you are and how hard you’re willing to work. Take your shot. For example:
I’m Natalia: your next junior sales associate. I have a demonstrated track record of succeeding in customer-facing positions and there’s nobody who will work harder to make sure that [Company Name] clients feel welcome and valued.
Experience
To talk about experience, we must first talk about the fictional CV police we have all hired to keep watch inside our own heads.
If you’re anything like me, you want to be an honest person. There’s a real difference, however, between honesty and selling yourself short — and we often confuse the two when we sit down to explain our professional experience in bullet point form. We instinctively and subconsciously decide that we’d rather undersell ourselves just in case someone calls us out for lying. Get caught lying and you’ll never get the job, right?
When I was working at Facebook, a friend on the inside casually asked me if I was considering applying for a management position she thought I might want. ‘Have you managed before?’ she asked me.
‘Not officially, no,’ I mindlessly answered. ‘Not in the context of a big company, anyway.’
‘So you have managed. You know the answer is always yes, when someone asks.’
I wasn’t taking my own advice: that relevant experience doesn’t always come from official, real, salaried jobs. When I was running my own consulting practice, a client put me in charge of hiring and managing a team of 20 freelance writers for a massive eight-month-long project. Another client had me hire and mentor a team of nine interns one summer. I acted as interim CMO of a fashion company in the lead-up to Berlin Fashion Week and hired a team of four. The year after I started #ENTRYLEVELBOSS, I wrote up a job description for a marketing assistant who I then proceeded to source, interview, hire, train, and manage. What I hadn’t done: been a salaried employee who was in charge of another salaried employee.
Nope, no management experience. Not here. Not me.
There is no CV police that knows your financial history, or how your past employer’s departments and hierarchies were organised, and they certainly don’t know where you live. Skills don’t always come explicitly from the workload that was originally assigned to you, you know? If you did the work of five people or took on more responsibility than was originally planned, please talk about it. The CV police is not going to stomp into your next interview, sirens wailing, screaming about how you shouldn’t be allowed to claim that you know a certain skill because of … some reason you made up in your own head that validates why that experience shouldn’t count.
Aagya, now based in Brooklyn, talked to me about the importance of being thoughtful and creative when it comes to demonstrating your experience:
After deciding not to pursue an MD/PhD, I wanted to go into the business side of healthcare. I thought that no one would hire me and that I would have to go to grad school, so I took the GMAT and got into a Master’s programme. But, in the meantime, I also worked REALLY HARD on my CV. I used my experience as part of class council and student government to talk about leading teams and executing programs. I landed myself numerous interviews and ultimately turned down the Master’s place because I had already accepted a job in commercial strategy and operations at a top-tier consulting firm.
All my best copywriting secrets
Why is it that Very Professional CVs insist on sucking all joy out of the written word? If you’ve always thought your CV’s grammar sounded a little funny — like you were forcing yourself to write as the old-fashioned-and-yet-also-somehow-robotic version of yourself —you’re going to appreciate how simple I’m going to make this for you.
When you try to use the fancy, formal, ridiculously corporate tone that you’re ‘supposed’ to use on CVs, you’re actually making it a lot harder for recruiters and hiring managers to understand what you’ve accomplished. If you think something on your CV reads awkwardly, it probably does. If you think something on your CV is hard to understand, it probably is. It’s not like there’s some secret class of people out there who only speak Corporate English. Recruiters and employers are just people, and they’re only taking those eight seconds to skim through your CV. You can’t afford to have them spend half that time trying to decode your nonsensical sentences.
In no particular order, here are all the copywriting rules you need to follow. Your goal is to use language that is plain, simple, and readable. If you can’t understand it, nobody else can either.
Start each experience bullet point with an action verb:
If you already left that job, switch to past tense:
After the action verb (I run) part, finish each bullet point with the reason why you do what you do. The construction of the sentence will look like this:
Example: I run a company called #ENTRYLEVELBOSS to help job seekers get hired faster with less overwhelm.
(Aside from creating an easy-to-read sentence, you are signalling to the recruiter that you know your bigger purpose. You not only know how to complete a task, but you understand why that task is useful to the business or organisation. This positions you as more senior and strategic.)
Use numbers whenever possible, to support your case:
(There are pretty much only two reasons you’re going to get hired: you can either help save somebody some time, or help make somebody some money. The easiest way to prove it is to give cold, hard facts as often as possible in the form of numbers and figures.)
Example: I created a simple-to-use spreadsheet system to better organise our data, saving senior management an estimated 5–7 hours per month.
Example: I developed a year-long marketing strategy to raise awareness about the homeless shelter near our university that reached over 70,000 students and staff.
Example: I responded to 30–40 customer service emails daily, by personally explaining the product or directing the customer to the right contact.
(Numbers help recruiters quickly decipher the scale of your work. ‘A marketing strategy about homelessness’ doesn’t paint a specific enough picture. They have no additional context for your projects outside of what you tell them. Don’t let people assume you only put up one flyer about a bake sale, when you could give them the numbers they need to understand your work properly.)
Aim for order of importance instead of quantity:
Education
Finally, the Education section, down at the bottom. Universities and schools often tell you to list your educational achievements right up at the top — which is great advice if you’re literally still in education. But then what? If it’s been a few years and you’ve been holding off on doing so, it’s time to rip off the plaster and put your educational achievements firmly below your work experience section.
I know it can be tempting to cling to your degrees and qualifications, to try and use them as a shield. ‘But I have a degree,’ you might feel the need to whimper. ‘Yes, I graduated four years ago, but I got a first!’
I think you already know what I’m going to say about this after the chat we had in Step 2. If you are a graduate, at some point soon you need to stop telling people you went to university. The further away your graduation date sinks into the sands of time, the less and less relevant that achievement becomes. Clinging to your degree actually works in the opposite way that you’d like it to — as a red flag instead of a gold star. Why is this degree you finished four years ago still the most important thing in your professional background? You need to move on. Continue achieving rather than continue wishing your diploma could act as a makeshift life raft. It will not hold you.
Bonus: CV and cover letter formatting
Always remember that the documents you’re submitting are at the beginning of a beautiful journey. At smaller companies, but sometimes even at big ones, too, this ‘journey’ is not as elegant as you might think. Recruiters might just be throwing every CV they get in a giant Dropbox folder, for example. If you don’t title your CV clearly, you’re making this process more difficult for someone else — because you just sent them a doc titled Coverletter.pdf which can’t be distinguished from any of the other docs they received today from the other 25 candidates.
A more helpful solution:
FirstNameLastName_WhatThisDocIs_CompanyName_JobTitle_DateYouApplied.pdf
See, it looks just like this:
AlexaShoen_CV_GringottsBank_Analyst_March2019.pdf
AlexaShoen_CoverLetter_GringottsBank_Analyst_March2019.pdf
You will be making someone else’s job easier, showing off how organised you are, and — bonus Jedi mind trick — associating your name with that position simply based on the way you titled your attachment. Neat.
PS: Always send your attachments as PDFs instead of Word documents. The fonts and formatting can get screwed up in doc files, but PDFs always look the same no matter what.
Step 3 task list