Choose from a wide range of NEWCV resume templates and customize your NEWCV design with a single click.
Use ATS-optimised Resume and resume templates that pass applicant tracking systems. Our Resume builder helps recruiters read, scan, and shortlist your Resume faster.
Use professional field-tested resume templates that follow the exact Resume rules employers look for.
Create Resume
Use professional field-tested resume templates that follow the exact Resume rules employers look for.
Create ResumeA proper CV review is not just checking spelling, margins, or whether your CV looks “professional”. It is checking whether your CV gives a recruiter or hiring manager enough evidence to shortlist you quickly, confidently, and without doing detective work. In the UK job market, your CV usually has to pass two tests: it must be readable enough for an applicant tracking system and convincing enough for a human who is comparing you against other candidates. That second part is where most CVs fail.
When I review a CV, I am not asking, “Is this person impressive?” I am asking, “Can I clearly see why this person fits this role, this level, this company, and this hiring need?” If that answer is not obvious, the CV needs work.
A CV review is a structured assessment of whether your CV is strong enough to get interviews for the roles you are targeting. It looks at clarity, relevance, structure, evidence, positioning, keywords, gaps, achievements, and the overall story your CV tells.
Most candidates think a CV review means making the document neater. That is the surface level version. A recruiter level CV review goes much deeper.
A good CV review asks:
Does the CV match the type of role the candidate wants next?
Is the career direction clear?
Are the most relevant skills easy to find?
Does the CV prove impact, or does it only list responsibilities?
Is the candidate positioned at the right level?
Are there unexplained gaps, jumps, or confusing job titles?
The biggest mistake is reviewing your CV from your own memory instead of from the reader’s perspective.
You know what you meant. You know the context behind your job titles. You know why you left a role, why a project mattered, why a company was chaotic, why your responsibilities were bigger than your title suggested. The recruiter does not know any of that.
That is where many CVs become weak. They rely on context the reader does not have.
A candidate might write:
Weak Example
Responsible for managing projects and supporting stakeholders across multiple business areas.
This sounds fine at first glance, but it tells me very little. What type of projects? What stakeholders? What business areas? What level of responsibility? What changed because of your work?
A stronger version would be:
Good Example
Managed three operational improvement projects across finance, customer service, and compliance teams, reducing manual reporting time by 30 percent and improving weekly stakeholder visibility.
That version gives me scope, function, scale, and outcome. It helps me understand the value quickly.
This is the difference between a CV that describes activity and a CV that supports a hiring decision.
Would a recruiter understand this CV in less than one minute?
Would a hiring manager feel confident enough to interview this person?
That last question matters. A CV is not there to tell your whole life story. It is there to reduce doubt. Hiring is risk management dressed up as opportunity. Employers are not only looking for reasons to say yes. They are also scanning for reasons to hesitate.
A strong CV review helps remove those hesitations before they become silent rejections.
Recruiters do not read CVs like books. They scan, filter, compare, question, and then decide whether the CV is worth deeper attention.
That may sound brutal, but it is reality. A recruiter handling a busy role may have dozens or hundreds of applications. Even a good recruiter is not lovingly reading every line with a cup of tea and a highlighter. Lovely idea. Not happening.
A typical CV review process looks more like this:
First, I check the current or most recent role
Then I check whether the career direction matches the vacancy
Then I scan for relevant skills, sector exposure, tools, systems, qualifications, or achievements
Then I look at dates, job moves, gaps, and progression
Then I check whether the candidate is underqualified, overqualified, misaligned, or genuinely worth shortlisting
The most important thing to understand is that recruiters are usually looking for fit before excellence.
You can be excellent and still be rejected if your CV does not show fit clearly.
For example, if a hiring manager asks me for a finance business partner with stakeholder management experience, commercial insight, and strong Excel modelling, I am not just looking for a “good finance CV”. I am looking for those specific signals. If they are buried, vague, or missing, the CV becomes harder to progress.
That does not mean your CV needs to be stuffed with keywords. It means your evidence needs to be obvious.
A strong CV should answer three questions within the first third of the page.
Your CV should make your professional identity clear immediately. Not in a fluffy personal profile way, but in a practical way.
For example:
Project Manager with experience delivering operational change across financial services
HR Advisor specialising in employee relations, absence management, and policy implementation
Sales Executive with B2B experience across SaaS, account management, and new business development
These are clear. They tell the reader where to place you.
What does not work is vague positioning such as:
Weak Example
Motivated and hardworking professional with excellent communication skills and a passion for success.
That could belong to almost anyone, which means it helps no one.
Your CV should connect your background to the role you want. This is where many UK candidates lose interviews. They send a general CV and hope the employer connects the dots.
Do not make the reader do that work.
If you are applying for a compliance role, your CV should make compliance experience obvious. If you are applying for a customer success role, your CV should highlight retention, onboarding, relationship management, and customer outcomes. If you are applying for an operations role, your process, efficiency, reporting, and cross functional coordination should stand out.
Relevance is not about including everything you have ever done. It is about choosing the evidence that supports the next move.
Claims are weak without evidence.
Many CVs say the candidate is strategic, organised, analytical, commercial, proactive, or results driven. Fine. But where is the proof?
Proof can include:
Revenue growth
Cost savings
Process improvements
Team size
Project scale
Client portfolio size
Systems used
Stakeholder level
Compliance outcomes
Customer satisfaction improvement
The goal is not to turn every bullet into a dramatic success story. Some roles are not measured in neat numbers, and forced metrics can look ridiculous. The goal is to give enough evidence that the reader can understand your level and contribution.
When I review a CV, I look for alignment before I look for polish. A beautifully formatted CV that is poorly positioned is still a weak CV.
A CV without direction creates uncertainty. If your CV looks like it could be aimed at five different career paths, the recruiter may not know where to place you.
This is especially common with candidates who have broad experience. They often try to include everything to avoid “missing something”. The problem is that everything becomes noise.
A strong CV makes a choice. It says, clearly and practically, “This is the type of candidate I am, and this is the value I bring.”
In the UK, a two page CV is usually standard for most experienced professionals. But the first page has to do most of the selling.
The first page should usually include:
Name and contact details
Professional profile or summary
Key skills or areas of expertise
Most recent role
Strongest relevant achievements
If the strongest evidence is on page two, you are making the reader work too hard. That may sound unfair, but CV screening is not a treasure hunt. If the good stuff is hidden, it may never be seen.
Job titles are not always reliable. One company’s “Executive” is another company’s “Manager”. One company’s “Coordinator” is doing the work of a department lead because the business is understaffed and pretending that is “development”. We have all seen that little circus.
A good CV review checks whether your job titles need explanation.
For example, if your title was “Office Administrator” but you managed payroll, suppliers, onboarding, finance admin, and HR records, your CV needs to show that broader scope. Otherwise, the title may undersell you.
Career gaps are not automatically a problem. Confusing gaps are the problem.
Recruiters notice gaps, short roles, overlapping dates, unexplained changes, and sudden shifts. They do not always reject them. But they will question them.
A good CV review checks whether anything in your timeline creates unnecessary doubt.
You do not need to overshare personal details. You do need to make the timeline understandable.
For example:
Career break for family responsibilities
Fixed term contract
Redundancy following company restructure
Freelance consulting projects
Relocation to the UK
Simple context is often enough.
A modern CV review must consider both applicant tracking systems and human readers. But this is where candidates often get bad advice.
An applicant tracking system does not “hire” you. It stores, sorts, parses, and sometimes ranks applications depending on the system and employer setup. The bigger issue is that your CV must be easy for both software and people to understand.
For UK applications, that usually means:
Use a clean layout
Avoid text boxes that may parse badly
Use standard section headings
Include relevant keywords naturally
Avoid overly designed templates
Keep dates consistent
Use clear job titles and company names
Save the file in the requested format
ATS friendly does not mean ugly. It means readable. The goal is not to trick a system. The goal is to avoid formatting choices that damage your chances before a human even reads the CV.
I see candidates overcomplicate this constantly. They hear “ATS” and start writing like a robot swallowed a job advert. That is not strategy. That is panic with keywords.
Use the language of the job description, but keep it natural. If the role asks for stakeholder management, budget control, Salesforce, onboarding, financial reporting, GDPR, or Python, those terms should appear where genuinely accurate. Do not add skills you cannot defend in an interview. Recruiters remember that. Hiring managers definitely remember that.
A proper CV review should go through every section with a clear purpose. Each section has a job. If it does not help the reader understand your suitability, it needs to be improved or removed.
This should be simple.
Include:
Full name
Phone number
Professional email address
Location, such as Manchester, Birmingham, London, Leeds, Glasgow, or remote UK
LinkedIn profile, if it is complete and consistent with your CV
You do not need your full address. You do not need your date of birth, marital status, nationality, or a photo for standard UK applications.
Your profile should position you, not decorate the page.
A good profile explains:
Your professional identity
Your key specialisms
Your level of experience
Your sector or function exposure
The value you bring to the target role
Keep it specific. Avoid personality claims unless they are supported by professional context.
Weak Example
I am a passionate and enthusiastic team player with excellent communication skills and a strong desire to succeed.
Good Example
Commercially focused Account Manager with experience managing B2B client portfolios across technology and professional services. Strong background in retention, upselling, stakeholder engagement, and resolving service issues before they affect renewal decisions.
The good version gives me something to work with. The weak version gives me soft words and no evidence.
The skills section should not become a dumping ground. It should reflect the role you are targeting.
For example, a strong skills section for a Project Manager might include:
Project planning and delivery
Risk and issue management
Budget tracking
Stakeholder communication
Process improvement
Agile and waterfall environments
Reporting and governance
A weak skills section says:
Hardworking
Reliable
Friendly
Motivated
Microsoft Office
Those may be true, but they do not differentiate you. In competitive UK hiring, basic traits rarely win interviews. Evidence of capability does.
This is the most important section for most candidates.
Each role should show:
Job title
Employer name
Location
Dates
Brief scope of role
Key responsibilities
Achievements or impact
The biggest issue I see is that candidates describe what their job was supposed to involve rather than what they actually delivered.
Weak Example
Managed customer accounts and handled queries.
Good Example
Managed a portfolio of 120 SME customer accounts, resolving service issues, identifying upsell opportunities, and improving renewal conversations through structured account reviews.
The good version shows size, responsibility, commercial awareness, and practical value.
For most experienced candidates, education should be clear but not dominate the CV. For graduates or early career applicants, it may need more detail.
Include qualifications that support the role. For UK applications, this might include GCSEs, A levels, degrees, apprenticeships, professional certifications, CIPD, ACCA, CIMA, Prince2, AAT, NEBOSH, ITIL, or sector relevant training.
Do not overload the section with every online course you have ever taken. A CV is not a storage cupboard.
Additional sections can help when they are relevant.
Useful sections may include:
Certifications
Technical skills
Languages
Projects
Publications
Volunteering
Professional memberships
Security clearance, where relevant
Remove anything that weakens focus. Hobbies are optional. They can help for early career candidates or where genuinely relevant, but they rarely rescue a weak CV.
A strong CV does not just look neat. It creates confidence.
A recruiter feels more confident when the CV shows:
Clear career progression
Relevant responsibilities
Evidence of impact
Consistent dates
Strong alignment with the vacancy
Appropriate level of detail
Good judgement about what to include
No obvious exaggeration
That last point matters more than candidates think. Exaggeration is not always obvious at first, but vague senior language can raise questions.
For example, a candidate might write:
Weak Example
Led strategic transformation across the business.
That sounds impressive, but it may be too big and too vague. Did you lead it, support it, coordinate it, report on it, or attend meetings about it while someone else led it?
A better version would be:
Good Example
Coordinated reporting and stakeholder updates for a finance transformation project involving three regional teams, supporting the project lead with risk tracking, process documentation, and weekly governance packs.
This is more believable, more specific, and easier to trust.
Hiring managers do not need every candidate to sound like a superhero. They need to understand what you actually did and whether it fits their problem.
Some CV problems are obvious. Others are quiet interview killers.
A generic CV usually tries to appeal to everyone and ends up convincing no one.
If your profile, skills, and achievements could apply to dozens of unrelated roles, your CV is not positioned tightly enough.
A good CV review should check whether the CV has been shaped around a clear target role or job family.
Responsibilities show what you were hired to do. Achievements show how well you did it.
Not every bullet needs a metric, but your CV should show contribution. If you improved something, solved something, delivered something, reduced something, increased something, prevented something, managed something complex, or supported a major decision, say so.
This is subtle but important.
Many candidates use internal language from their company. Internal acronyms, department names, project names, and process labels may mean nothing outside that organisation.
A recruiter reviewing your CV needs external clarity. Translate internal language into market language.
For example, instead of writing:
Weak Example
Supported the Phoenix workstream and BAU uplift activity.
Write:
Good Example
Supported a customer service improvement project focused on reducing backlog, improving case allocation, and increasing daily resolution capacity.
That version makes sense outside your company.
Sometimes a CV undersells seniority. Sometimes it oversells it. Both can cause problems.
If you managed people, budgets, projects, suppliers, clients, or stakeholders, be clear about the level and scale. If you supported senior leaders, say who you supported and how. If you influenced without direct authority, explain that.
Hiring managers are often trying to work out whether you can operate at the level they need. Do not leave that to guesswork.
A long CV is not always a sign of experience. Sometimes it is a sign that the candidate has not decided what matters.
For most UK professionals, two pages is enough. Senior executives, academics, consultants, contractors, and technical specialists may need more in specific situations, but length should be justified by relevance.
Cut anything that does not support the role you want next.
Reviewing your CV without a target role is useful, but reviewing it against a job description is where the real improvement happens.
Start by reading the job advert properly. Not just the title. Not just the salary. Look for the evidence the employer is asking for.
Pay attention to:
Required skills
Repeated phrases
Technical systems
Industry knowledge
Qualifications
Stakeholder level
Management responsibilities
Commercial expectations
Compliance or regulatory requirements
Soft skills that are actually role critical
Then compare your CV against the advert.
Ask yourself:
Can the recruiter see the required experience quickly?
Have I used the same natural terminology where accurate?
Is my strongest matching evidence on page one?
Have I shown outcomes connected to the role?
Are there any missing keywords that genuinely belong in my CV?
Does my profile align with this vacancy, or does it sound too broad?
This is where tailoring matters. Tailoring does not mean rewriting your entire CV for every application. It means adjusting emphasis so the most relevant evidence is easy to find.
A hiring manager should not have to think, “Maybe they could do this.” Your CV should help them think, “This looks relevant enough to interview.”
Job adverts and hiring feedback are full of polite language. A useful CV review helps you decode it.
When an employer says they want someone “dynamic”, they may mean they need someone comfortable with ambiguity, pace, and shifting priorities.
When they ask for “excellent stakeholder management”, they may mean the role involves difficult internal relationships, competing priorities, or senior people who need careful handling.
When they want someone “hands on”, they may mean there is limited support and you will need to do the work yourself, not just manage it.
When they ask for “strong communication skills”, they may mean you need to explain complex information to people who are busy, sceptical, or not technical.
When they ask for “commercial awareness”, they usually want to see that you understand money, customers, risk, efficiency, margins, growth, or business impact.
Your CV should not just repeat these phrases. It should prove them.
For example, if the job advert asks for stakeholder management, do not simply list “stakeholder management” in your skills section. Show who the stakeholders were, what you managed, and why it mattered.
Use this framework before sending your CV for any UK job application.
Does the CV clearly match the role?
Check whether the job title, profile, skills, and most recent experience support the target position. If the CV feels like it belongs to a different career goal, fix the positioning first.
Can someone understand the CV quickly?
Look at spacing, section headings, bullet length, font size, and page structure. Dense blocks of text are easy to ignore. Recruiters are human. Tired humans, often. Help them.
Have you shown proof of value?
Replace vague duties with specific contributions. Add numbers where useful, but do not force them. Clear scope can be just as valuable as a metric.
Does anything create doubt?
Check for unexplained gaps, inconsistent dates, unclear job moves, confusing titles, irrelevant information, or claims that sound exaggerated.
Will the CV parse properly?
Use a simple format, clear headings, standard dates, and natural keywords from the job description. Avoid heavy design, columns that scramble text, icons, graphics, and unusual section names.
Can you defend everything on the CV?
This is the part candidates forget. Your CV is not just a marketing document. It is also the script for your interview. If you cannot explain a claim clearly, rewrite it or remove it.
You should review your CV before any serious job search, but some situations make it especially important.
A CV review is useful when:
You are applying but not getting interviews
You are changing career direction
You are returning after a career break
You have recently relocated to the UK
You are moving from public sector to private sector, or the reverse
You are applying for more senior roles
You are moving from contract to permanent work
You have a complicated career history
You are not sure how to explain redundancy, gaps, or short roles
Your CV has grown over time and now feels messy
The key sign is this: if your CV feels accurate but not convincing, it probably needs a strategic review rather than a quick tidy up.
Accuracy is not enough. A CV can be factually correct and still poorly positioned.
Before you send your CV, go through this checklist properly.
Does the first page clearly show the role I am targeting?
Is my professional profile specific rather than generic?
Are my most relevant skills easy to find?
Have I included keywords from the job description where truthful?
Does each role include scope, responsibility, and impact?
Have I removed outdated or irrelevant detail?
Are my dates consistent and easy to understand?
Have I explained career gaps or short contracts where needed?
Is my CV readable on screen and in PDF format?
Have I avoided graphics, text boxes, and formatting that may confuse ATS software?
Are my achievements believable and specific?
Does my CV sound like me, or like a generic template?
Can I defend every claim in an interview?
Would a recruiter understand my suitability in under one minute?
If you cannot answer yes to most of these, your CV is not ready yet. That is not a disaster. It just means you have found the problem before the employer does.
A CV review should not turn your CV into a fake version of you.
This matters. Some CV advice pushes candidates to inflate every task until it sounds like board level strategy. That can backfire badly. Recruiters and hiring managers can usually sense when language is bigger than the experience behind it.
A good CV review should not:
Add skills you do not have
Rewrite your CV in unnatural corporate language
Remove all personality
Make every bullet sound identical
Stuff keywords everywhere
Hide important context
Turn simple experience into exaggerated claims
Focus only on design
The best CVs are clear, relevant, credible, and easy to trust.
That is the standard I would aim for.
A CV review is not about making your CV perfect. Perfect is not the goal. Shortlistable is the goal.
Your CV needs to help a recruiter quickly understand what you do, why you fit the role, what evidence supports that fit, and whether there are any risks worth questioning. In the UK job market, where competition can be high and recruiters are often screening under pressure, clarity is not a nice bonus. It is part of your strategy.
The candidates who get interviews are not always the most qualified. They are often the candidates whose CV makes the strongest relevant case with the least confusion.
That is the real purpose of a CV review. Not decoration. Not buzzwords. Not pretending to be someone else. Just sharp, honest, well positioned evidence that helps the right employer say yes.
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.
Delivery timelines
Promotions
Awards or recognition, where genuinely relevant
Upload Resume
Import from Linkedin