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Create ResumeA British CV template should be clear, professional, easy to scan, and built around relevance. For most UK roles, the strongest format is a reverse chronological CV with your contact details, short profile, key skills, work experience, education, and relevant additional sections. The point is not to impress recruiters with decoration. It is to help them understand, quickly, whether your background matches the role.
I see many candidates overcomplicate their CV because they think a “standout” template means colour blocks, icons, graphics, columns, rating bars, and clever formatting. In real hiring, that usually creates more friction. A good British CV template does something quieter but much more powerful: it makes the right information impossible to miss.
A British CV template is a structured CV format designed for UK job applications. It usually includes a professional profile, key skills, reverse chronological work experience, education, and any relevant qualifications, certifications, technical skills, languages, or professional memberships.
The word “template” can be misleading. Candidates often think they need a visually impressive design. Recruiters are usually looking for something else entirely: clarity, relevance, evidence, and sensible formatting.
A strong British CV template should help a recruiter answer these questions quickly:
What does this person do?
What level are they operating at?
Have they done similar work before?
Do they match the role requirements?
Are their achievements credible?
Is there enough evidence to justify an interview?
That is the real job of your CV. Not to tell your life story. Not to prove you are a hardworking team player in seven different ways. Not to win a design award from someone who has never screened 150 applications before lunch.
For most UK job applications, I recommend this structure:
Contact details
Professional profile
Key skills
Work experience
Education
Certifications and professional development
Technical skills, languages, or tools
Additional information, only if relevant
This structure works because it follows how recruiters naturally screen. They start with the top section to understand your positioning, then they check your most recent experience, then they look for evidence that matches the job specification.
Here is the basic British CV template I would use.
[Your Full Name]
[Target Job Title or Professional Positioning]
Location: [Town or City, UK]
Phone: [Mobile Number]
Email: [Professional Email Address]
LinkedIn: [LinkedIn URL]
Portfolio or Website: [Only if relevant]
Professional Profile
[Write 3 to 5 lines summarising who you are, the level you operate at, your main areas of expertise, and the type of value you bring. Keep it specific to the role you are targeting.]
Key Skills
[Skill directly relevant to the role]
[Technical, operational, commercial, or specialist skill]
[Industry knowledge or functional expertise]
[Tool, system, methodology, or process]
[Leadership, stakeholder, client, or project skill if relevant]
[Compliance, reporting, analysis, delivery, or performance skill if relevant]
Work Experience
[Job Title]
[Company Name], [Location]
[Month Year] to [Present or Month Year]
[Brief one-line context if the company, role, team, or scope needs explanation.]
[Achievement, responsibility, or impact linked to the target role]
[Evidence of scope, volume, budget, stakeholder group, team size, market, system, or process]
[Specific result, improvement, delivery, project, client outcome, or measurable contribution]
[Relevant responsibility that proves capability]
[Another achievement written with enough context to be believable]
[Previous Job Title]
[Company Name], [Location]
[Month Year] to [Month Year]
[Relevant responsibility or achievement]
[Evidence of performance or progression]
[Project, process, system, or stakeholder example]
Education
[Qualification]
[Institution Name], [Location]
[Year Completed]
[Include grades only if they strengthen your application or are requested.]
Certifications and Professional Development
[Certification Name], [Provider], [Year]
[Training, licence, or professional qualification]
Technical Skills
Additional Information
A British CV is not read like a personal essay. It is screened.
That sounds brutal, but it matters. When a recruiter opens your CV, they are not calmly admiring your formatting with a cup of tea and unlimited patience. They are usually comparing your CV against a job brief, hiring manager expectations, salary range, location requirements, availability, technical skills, and the strength of other candidates.
The template works because it supports that screening behaviour. It puts the most decision-relevant information where recruiters expect it.
A strong UK CV template should make your fit obvious in the first half of page one. If the reader has to hunt for your job title, sector, level, key skills, or recent experience, the CV is already working against you.
This is where many candidates misunderstand “personal branding”. Your CV does not need to sound like a motivational LinkedIn post. It needs to position you clearly for the job you want.
For example, this is vague:
Weak Example
“Hardworking and enthusiastic professional with excellent communication skills and a passion for delivering results.”
This sounds pleasant, but it tells me almost nothing. Almost every candidate believes they communicate well and deliver results. Recruiters cannot shortlist based on personality adjectives.
This is stronger:
Good Example
“Operations Manager with experience leading multi-site service delivery teams across logistics and facilities environments. Skilled in workforce planning, supplier management, KPI reporting, process improvement, and improving operational performance in fast-paced, high-volume settings.”
This works because it gives me context, level, sector, skills, and likely fit. I can immediately understand the candidate’s professional shape.
Your contact details should be simple. Include your name, town or city, phone number, email address, and LinkedIn profile if it is professional and up to date.
You do not need your full home address. In most UK hiring processes, town or city is enough. Recruiters need to understand location, commute, hybrid suitability, or regional relevance. They do not need your door number.
Avoid including:
Date of birth
Marital status
National Insurance number
Full postal address
Personal photo unless specifically requested for a relevant international market
Multiple phone numbers
Unprofessional email addresses
A small but real recruiter point: if your LinkedIn profile tells a different story from your CV, it creates doubt. It does not need to duplicate the CV perfectly, but the job titles, dates, and general positioning should make sense together.
Your professional profile should be short, specific, and role relevant. Think of it as your positioning statement, not your autobiography.
It should answer:
What are you professionally?
What level are you operating at?
What sectors, functions, or environments do you know?
What are your strongest relevant skills?
What value do you bring to the employer?
A weak profile usually tries to be universally appealing. That is exactly the problem. If your profile could fit an administrator, project coordinator, sales executive, HR assistant, and customer service advisor, it is too vague.
Weak Example
“I am a motivated, reliable and organised individual looking for a challenging role where I can develop my skills and contribute to a successful company.”
The issue is not that this is bad English. The issue is that it gives the recruiter no selection evidence.
Good Example
“HR Advisor with experience supporting employee relations, onboarding, absence management, HR reporting, and policy administration across fast-paced commercial environments. Confident advising managers, maintaining accurate HR records, and supporting practical people processes that balance compliance with operational reality.”
This is useful because it reflects actual HR work. It gives a hiring manager something to compare against their vacancy.
The key skills section should not be a random list of nice qualities. It should mirror the capabilities required for your target role.
A good skills section includes a mix of:
Role-specific skills
Technical tools
Industry knowledge
Process knowledge
Stakeholder or client management
Leadership or delivery skills where relevant
Do not fill this section with soft skills alone. “Communication”, “teamwork”, and “time management” are not useless, but they are weak when listed without context. Everyone writes them. Recruiters skim past them because they rarely differentiate one candidate from another.
A stronger approach is to make skills specific:
Stakeholder management across finance, operations, and senior leadership teams
Monthly management reporting and variance analysis
CRM pipeline management using Salesforce
Employee relations case support and HR documentation
B2B account management and client retention
Project coordination across suppliers, timelines, and budgets
This helps both recruiters and applicant tracking systems understand relevance without turning your CV into a keyword dump.
This is the most important section of your British CV.
Your work experience should be in reverse chronological order, starting with your most recent role. For each position, include your job title, employer, location, dates, short context where useful, and achievement-led bullet points.
The mistake I see constantly is candidates describing tasks without showing judgement, scope, or impact.
Weak Example
That could mean almost anything.
Good Example
This is stronger because it shows scope, audience, task, and business purpose.
Your bullet points should not all start with “responsible for”. That phrase is passive and often hides the real value. Use clearer verbs that show action and ownership, such as:
Led
Managed
Delivered
Improved
Coordinated
Analysed
Supported
Built
Implemented
Resolved
The best CV bullet points usually combine three things: what you did, the context, and why it mattered.
A useful formula is:
Action plus context plus outcome
For example:
Improved onboarding documentation for new starters, reducing repeated manager queries and creating a clearer handover process across the team
Managed a portfolio of SME accounts, maintaining regular client contact, identifying renewal risks, and supporting revenue retention
Analysed monthly sales performance using Excel and CRM reports, highlighting trends that helped managers prioritise follow-up activity
You do not need metrics for every bullet point. This is another common misconception. Metrics help, but forced numbers can look suspicious. If you genuinely have figures, use them. If you do not, show scope, frequency, complexity, stakeholders, systems, or outcomes.
Your education section should be clear and proportionate.
If you are early career, your education may sit higher on the CV and include more detail. If you have several years of relevant experience, education usually moves lower and becomes more concise.
Include:
Degree, diploma, apprenticeship, A levels, GCSEs, or relevant qualification
Institution name
Location if useful
Completion year
Relevant modules only if they genuinely support your target role
Do not overload the education section if your work experience is stronger. A hiring manager recruiting for a Finance Manager, Marketing Lead, Software Engineer, or Operations Director will usually care more about your recent delivery than a long list of school-level subjects.
Include certifications if they improve your credibility for the role.
Examples might include:
CIPD for HR roles
ACCA, CIMA, ACA, or AAT for finance roles
PRINCE2, Agile, Scrum, or PMP for project roles
NEBOSH or IOSH for health and safety roles
Microsoft, AWS, Azure, Google, or cybersecurity certifications for technical roles
Industry licences or compliance training where relevant
Be careful with short online courses. They can be useful, especially for career changers, but they should not be presented as equal to deep professional experience. Recruiters can tell the difference between practical experience and a weekend certificate dressed up like a qualification.
Technical skills matter more than many candidates realise, especially in roles where systems knowledge affects ramp-up time.
Include tools and platforms relevant to your field. For example:
Microsoft Excel, Power BI, Tableau, SQL
Salesforce, HubSpot, Dynamics
Workday, SAP SuccessFactors, BambooHR
Sage, Xero, QuickBooks, SAP
Jira, Asana, Trello, Monday.com
Python, JavaScript, HTML, CSS
Adobe Creative Cloud, Figma, Canva
Do not exaggerate technical ability. If you list advanced Excel and then cannot explain pivot tables, lookups, or reporting logic in an interview, the credibility drops quickly. It is better to be accurate than impressive for five minutes and exposed in round two.
Below is a clean British CV template you can adapt. Keep the structure, but make the content specific to your target role.
Amira Patel
Marketing Executive
Location: Manchester, UK
Phone: 07xxx xxx xxx
Email: amira.patel@email.com
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/amirapatel
Professional Profile
Marketing Executive with experience supporting B2B campaign delivery, content coordination, CRM activity, email marketing, events, and performance reporting. Confident working with sales teams, external suppliers, and senior stakeholders to deliver practical marketing activity that supports lead generation and brand visibility. Skilled in HubSpot, Google Analytics, Canva, LinkedIn campaign support, and campaign performance tracking.
Key Skills
B2B campaign coordination
Email marketing and CRM segmentation
Content planning and copywriting
Social media scheduling and reporting
Event marketing support
Sales and marketing alignment
HubSpot, Google Analytics, Canva, and Excel
Supplier coordination and stakeholder communication
Work Experience
Marketing Executive
Brightline Solutions, Manchester
March 2023 to Present
B2B technology services company supporting clients across professional services, retail, and logistics.
Coordinated monthly email campaigns in HubSpot, supporting audience segmentation, content uploads, testing, scheduling, and performance reporting
Worked with the sales team to align campaign activity with priority accounts, improving follow-up visibility and lead tracking across the CRM
Supported the delivery of webinars and client events, managing registration pages, attendee communications, supplier coordination, and post-event reporting
Created LinkedIn content drafts, campaign assets, and short-form copy to support brand awareness and demand generation activity
Prepared monthly marketing reports covering email engagement, website traffic, event performance, and campaign contribution to pipeline activity
Marketing Assistant
Northgate Business Services, Leeds
July 2021 to February 2023
Supported the Marketing Manager with campaign administration, social media scheduling, competitor research, and website content updates
Maintained marketing contact lists and helped improve CRM data accuracy ahead of campaign launches
Coordinated branded materials for sales meetings, exhibitions, and internal communications
Assisted with blog uploads, basic SEO checks, image formatting, and publishing schedules
Monitored campaign inboxes and routed enquiries to sales colleagues for follow-up
Education
BA Business and Marketing
Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester
2021
Certifications and Professional Development
Google Analytics Certification, 2024
HubSpot Email Marketing Certification, 2023
Technical Skills
HubSpot
Google Analytics
Canva
Mailchimp
Microsoft Excel
LinkedIn Campaign Manager
WordPress
This template works because it does not rely on empty claims. It gives the recruiter enough detail to understand level, environment, tools, responsibilities, and relevance.
A British CV is usually slightly longer and more detailed than a US resume. In the UK, a two-page CV is normal for many professionals, while a one-page CV can work well for graduates, early career candidates, or people with limited experience.
The bigger difference is not only length. It is expectation.
In the UK, a CV usually includes a professional profile, a clear employment history, education, and sometimes more detail around qualifications or sector-specific experience. A US resume is often more compressed and achievement-heavy, with stricter one-page expectations in many fields.
What you should not do is copy a US resume template and assume it fits UK hiring. I see this often with candidates applying internationally. The format may look polished, but it can feel too thin for UK recruiters if it removes useful context.
A British CV should not include a photo for most standard UK applications. It should also avoid personal details that are not relevant to hiring. Keep the document professional, focused, and compliant with modern expectations.
A good British CV template should be easy to read on screen, easy to scan quickly, and easy for applicant tracking systems to parse.
Use:
A clean font such as Calibri, Arial, Aptos, Helvetica, or similar
Font size around 10.5 to 12 for body text
Clear section headings
Consistent spacing
Reverse chronological order
Standard bullet points
Simple formatting
Word or PDF format depending on the employer’s instruction
Avoid:
Photos
Icons that replace words
Skill rating bars
Heavy graphics
Text boxes
Multiple columns if they affect readability
Tables that may confuse parsing
Overdesigned headers
Tiny margins
The biggest formatting mistake is believing that design can compensate for weak positioning. It cannot. A beautiful CV that hides the important evidence is still a poor CV.
Recruiters do not reject plain CVs because they are plain. They reject unclear CVs because they are hard to assess.
An ATS friendly British CV is not about tricking software. It is about making your CV easy for systems and humans to read.
Applicant tracking systems help employers store, search, filter, and manage applications. They are not mythical robots sitting in a dark room rejecting people because they used the wrong synonym. But poor formatting can still cause problems, especially if your CV relies on design elements that do not parse cleanly.
To make your British CV more ATS friendly:
Use standard headings such as Work Experience, Education, Skills, and Certifications
Include relevant job title keywords naturally
Match important language from the job advert where truthful
Avoid placing key information only in headers, footers, images, or graphics
Use clear dates and employer names
Keep formatting simple
Avoid columns if they create reading order issues
Save in the requested file format
This does not mean stuffing your CV with keywords. Keyword stuffing is obvious and usually unpleasant to read. The better approach is to describe your real experience using the same professional language the employer uses.
For example, if a job advert asks for “stakeholder management”, and you have that experience, use the phrase naturally. Do not write “stakeholder management” fifteen times as if repetition creates competence. It does not. It creates suspicion.
The most common mistake is creating one all-purpose CV and sending it everywhere.
I understand why candidates do it. Job searching is tiring. Tailoring every CV feels like unpaid admin with emotional consequences. But a generic CV usually performs badly because it makes the recruiter do the matching work.
Recruiters are not supposed to decode your entire career and guess which bits matter. Your CV should guide them.
A tailored CV does not mean rewriting everything from scratch. It means adjusting your profile, skills, and bullet point order so the most relevant evidence appears first.
Many CVs read like job descriptions.
The problem is that job descriptions show what you were hired to do, not necessarily what you did well.
Instead of only writing:
Write something more useful:
That gives a recruiter scope and credibility.
The first page of your CV is prime space. Do not waste it on long personal statements, generic soft skills, or irrelevant early education if you have stronger professional evidence.
The first page should usually show:
Your current professional positioning
Your most relevant skills
Your current or most recent role
Clear evidence that matches the job
If your best evidence is buried on page two, the template is not doing its job.
Creative templates can work for design-led roles when the portfolio carries the visual proof. But for most UK jobs, creative formatting is more likely to distract than help.
For finance, operations, HR, administration, project management, sales, compliance, legal, healthcare, education, and most corporate roles, clarity beats creativity.
This is not boring advice. It is practical advice. The CV is not the place to make the reader solve a design puzzle.
A British CV does not need to include every task you have ever performed. It needs to include the information that helps the employer assess your fit.
Older or less relevant roles can be shortened. Recent and relevant roles deserve more detail.
For example, if you are applying for a Senior Project Manager role, your current project delivery experience matters far more than a part-time retail role from 14 years ago. Keep the older role if it explains your career history, but do not give it the same space as your strongest evidence.
If you are a graduate or early career candidate, your CV may include more education detail, internships, placements, volunteering, projects, part-time work, and transferable skills.
The key is not to apologise for limited experience. The key is to show evidence of potential, reliability, learning ability, and relevance.
Include:
Degree or qualification details
Relevant modules or projects
Internships or placements
Part-time work with transferable responsibilities
Volunteering or society leadership
Technical tools
Customer service, administration, research, teamwork, or communication evidence
Do not write a CV that says “I do not have experience” in ten different ways. Show what you do have.
At mid-level, your CV should focus on delivery, ownership, systems, stakeholders, and measurable contribution.
Hiring managers at this level want to know whether you can do the job without constant hand-holding. Your CV should show that you understand your function, manage your workload, solve practical problems, and contribute beyond basic tasks.
Prioritise:
Recent achievements
Scope of responsibility
Stakeholder relationships
Systems and tools
Process improvement
Commercial or operational impact
Evidence of progression
Senior CVs need sharper positioning. The mistake senior candidates make is listing too much detail because they have done a lot. The result can feel heavy, unfocused, and strangely less impressive.
At senior level, your CV should show:
Leadership scope
Strategic impact
Commercial outcomes
Change, transformation, growth, or stabilisation
Board, investor, client, or senior stakeholder exposure
Team size, budget, region, market, or operational scale
Decision-making authority
A senior British CV can still be two pages if written tightly. The point is not to shrink your career. The point is to select the evidence that supports your next move.
Before sending your CV, check it against the job advert and ask yourself:
Is my target role clear within the first few seconds?
Does my profile match the job I am applying for?
Have I included the most relevant keywords naturally?
Does my recent experience show evidence, not just duties?
Are my strongest achievements visible on page one?
Is the formatting simple and consistent?
Have I removed outdated personal details?
Are dates, job titles, and company names easy to follow?
Have I checked spelling, grammar, and formatting?
Does my CV explain my fit without making the recruiter work too hard?
That last point is the one candidates underestimate. A CV is not just a record of employment. It is a decision document. It should make the next step feel obvious.
A template gives you structure. It does not fix unclear positioning.
If you are changing careers, returning after a break, applying internationally, moving industries, stepping up a level, or struggling to get interviews despite being qualified, the issue may not be the template. It may be the story your CV is telling.
For example:
A career changer may need to reposition transferable skills more clearly
A senior candidate may need to reduce operational detail and show strategic value
A contractor may need to clarify project scope and outcomes
A graduate may need to make education, projects, and part-time work feel relevant
An international candidate may need to adapt terminology for UK recruiters
This is where honest judgement matters. Many candidates keep changing fonts when the real issue is relevance. The CV looks better, but it does not persuade better.
A good British CV template gives you the right container. You still need strong content inside it.
The best British CV template is not flashy. It is clear, structured, relevant, and easy to assess.
In real hiring, recruiters and hiring managers are usually not looking for the most beautifully designed CV. They are looking for the clearest evidence that you can do the job. Your CV should help them see that quickly.
Use a simple reverse chronological structure. Make your profile specific. Put relevant skills near the top. Write work experience with evidence, context, and outcomes. Keep formatting clean. Remove anything that creates distraction or doubt.
A good CV does not shout. It guides. It gives the recruiter enough confidence to move you from “possible applicant” to “worth speaking to”. That is the outcome the template should be built around.
Written by Simar Malhi, a recruiter and headhunter with international recruitment experience. I write about CVs, job applications, hiring decisions, and the reality behind recruitment processes. My goal is to help candidates understand more honestly how employers, recruiters, and hiring managers actually select candidates.
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