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 strong leadership CV does not simply say you are a leader. It proves the scale of what you led, the decisions you made, the problems you handled, and the commercial or operational results you influenced. In the UK job market, recruiters and hiring managers are not impressed by phrases like “strong communicator”, “strategic thinker” or “proven leader” unless your CV shows evidence behind them.
When I read a leadership CV, I am looking for three things quickly: scope, impact and judgement. Who did you lead? What changed because of your leadership? Were you trusted with meaningful responsibility, or are you just using senior sounding language? That is the difference between a CV that sounds confident and a CV that actually gets shortlisted.
A leadership CV is written for roles where employers expect you to influence people, performance, direction, delivery or change. That may include team leader, manager, head of department, director, senior manager, operations leader, project lead, commercial leader, people manager, transformation lead or executive roles.
The mistake many candidates make is treating leadership as a personality trait. They write about being supportive, organised, adaptable and motivational. Fine. Lovely. But employers are not hiring a motivational poster. They are hiring someone who can make decisions, handle pressure, manage people, improve outcomes and take responsibility when things get messy.
A leadership CV should prove:
The size and type of team you led
The level of responsibility you held
The decisions you were trusted to make
The problems you solved
The performance improvements you delivered
The biggest mistake is writing a leadership CV like a list of responsibilities.
Candidates often write:
Weak Example
Responsible for managing a team, supporting daily operations, improving performance and ensuring targets were met.
This says almost nothing. It tells me you had a management role, but not whether you were effective. It does not show scale, difficulty, accountability or outcome.
A stronger version would be:
Good Example
Led a team of 18 across customer operations, improving service response times by 32% within six months by restructuring workflows, introducing weekly performance reviews and coaching underperforming team members.
That works because it gives me:
Team size
Function
Improvement
Timeframe
The stakeholders you influenced
The budgets, targets, projects or operations you managed
The business impact of your leadership
The environments you can operate in, such as growth, turnaround, change, compliance, scale up or restructuring
In UK hiring, leadership is judged through evidence. A hiring manager may like your tone, but they will still ask: “Can this person actually operate at the level we need?” Your CV has to answer that before the interview.
Method
Leadership action
This is what recruiters mean when they say “show impact”. We do not mean decorate your CV with random numbers. We mean help us understand what changed because you were in the role.
Recruiters rarely read a leadership CV from top to bottom in the first pass. We scan it for signals. Not because we are careless, but because hiring is a filtering process. A recruiter may be comparing many candidates who all claim leadership experience. The first question is not “Is this person nice?” It is “Do they look relevant enough to take forward?”
On the first scan, I usually look for:
Current or most recent role title
Level of seniority
Industry relevance
Team size or leadership scope
Commercial, operational or strategic responsibility
Clear achievements
Progression pattern
Evidence of change, growth or improvement
Whether the CV is focused or trying to be everything to everyone
A leadership CV becomes weaker when I have to work too hard to understand the candidate’s level. If your CV says “managed operations”, I need to know what kind of operations. A five person internal admin team is different from a multi site operation with 150 staff. Both can be valuable, but they are not the same leadership proposition.
Hiring managers are even more direct. They often read a CV with a specific business problem in mind. They are thinking:
Can this person handle our team size?
Have they worked in a similar environment?
Will they need too much hand holding?
Have they delivered results, or only maintained processes?
Do they understand people leadership, or only task management?
Can they influence senior stakeholders?
Do they look credible for this salary level?
That is why vague leadership language fails. It does not help anyone make a confident decision.
A leadership CV should be easy to scan, commercially sharp and evidence led. It does not need dramatic design. In most UK hiring processes, especially where an applicant tracking system is involved, clarity beats creativity.
The strongest structure is:
Name and contact details
Target role or professional headline
Leadership profile
Core leadership strengths
Career history with achievement led role descriptions
Earlier career summary if needed
Education and professional development
Certifications, systems or sector specific credentials
Board, voluntary or advisory experience if relevant
For most UK leadership roles, two pages is ideal. Senior executives, board level candidates or candidates with complex consulting portfolios may need more, but longer is not automatically better. A long CV with weak evidence is still weak. It just takes longer to disappoint people.
Your profile is not a personal statement in the school leaver sense. It is a positioning statement. It should tell the reader what kind of leader you are, what level you operate at and where you create value.
Avoid empty introductions like:
Weak Example
I am a hardworking and passionate leader with excellent communication skills and a proven ability to motivate teams.
This sounds pleasant, but it could belong to almost anyone.
A stronger leadership profile would be:
Good Example
Operational leader with experience managing multi site customer service teams across the UK, with a strong record of improving service performance, reducing escalations and building accountable team structures. Known for turning unclear processes into measurable operating routines, coaching managers through change and creating practical performance standards that teams can actually follow.
This works because it gives shape to the candidate. It tells me their environment, leadership style, impact area and practical value.
Your leadership profile should usually cover:
Your leadership level
Your function or sector
The type of teams, projects or operations you lead
The business outcomes you influence
The leadership problems you are good at solving
Your target direction
Keep it specific. A profile that tries to cover every possible role often sounds weaker than one that clearly positions you for the right roles.
A leadership CV core skills section should not be a dump of fashionable keywords. This is where many candidates accidentally make themselves look generic.
Weak leadership skills lists usually include:
Leadership
Communication
Teamwork
Problem solving
Time management
Organisation
Motivation
These are not wrong. They are just too basic. At leadership level, they do not create much confidence.
A stronger leadership CV uses skills that reflect real leadership responsibility:
People leadership and performance management
Operational improvement
Stakeholder management
Change management
Budget ownership
Workforce planning
Coaching and management development
Strategic planning
Commercial decision making
The key is not to include everything. Choose the skills that match your target role. If you are applying for operations leadership roles, your CV should not read like a generic people manager CV. If you are applying for head of department roles, your CV needs to show strategic ownership, not only team supervision.
Leadership achievements need context. A result without context can feel suspicious or underwhelming.
For example:
Weak Example
Improved team performance by 20%.
That is better than nothing, but I still have questions. What performance? How was it measured? What did you actually do? Was the improvement because of you, market conditions, a new system or somebody else’s work?
A stronger version would be:
Good Example
Improved team productivity by 20% across a 14 person sales support function by redesigning task allocation, introducing clearer service level measures and coaching team leaders on weekly performance conversations.
That is much more credible.
A good leadership achievement usually includes:
The problem or situation
The action you took
The scope of responsibility
The measurable or observable result
The leadership judgement behind the action
You do not need numbers in every bullet point, but you do need evidence. Evidence can include:
Revenue growth
Cost reduction
Productivity improvement
Retention improvement
Customer satisfaction increase
Faster delivery times
Reduced complaints
Better compliance outcomes
Improved team engagement
Leadership is not only about big dramatic wins. Sometimes the best evidence is making a chaotic team stable, reducing turnover, rebuilding trust, improving communication between departments or helping managers make better decisions. But you still need to write it clearly.
Your bullet points should not read like job descriptions. They should show what you actually contributed.
Weak Example
Managed a team and ensured all tasks were completed on time.
Good Example
Led a team of 12 administrators through a period of increased workload, improving task completion rates by introducing clearer ownership, daily workflow checks and practical escalation routes.
Weak Example
Responsible for training staff.
Good Example
Designed and delivered onboarding training for new team members, reducing time to full productivity from eight weeks to five weeks while improving consistency across customer handling standards.
Weak Example
Worked with senior stakeholders.
Good Example
Partnered with senior leaders across operations, finance and HR to resolve workforce planning gaps, creating a reporting process that improved visibility of headcount, absence and capacity risks.
Weak Example
Improved morale in the team.
Good Example
Rebuilt team engagement after a restructure by introducing regular one to one conversations, clearer role expectations and manager coaching, contributing to reduced voluntary turnover over the following year.
The better examples work because they connect leadership action to business or team impact. They do not just say the candidate led. They show how.
This is important because many strong candidates undersell themselves. You do not need “Head of” or “Director” in your job title to show leadership. In the UK job market, many people lead projects, processes, junior colleagues, client relationships or cross functional work without a formal management title.
If you are applying for your first leadership role, show evidence of leadership behaviours such as:
Training new starters
Acting as a point of escalation
Leading projects or workstreams
Improving team processes
Coordinating rotas or workloads
Supporting junior colleagues
Deputising for a manager
Handling difficult customers or stakeholders
Taking ownership of reporting
Improving quality or compliance
Influencing peers without formal authority
The trick is to avoid pretending you have managed people if you have not. Recruiters spot that quickly. Instead, position yourself as someone who has already taken on leadership responsibility and is ready for formal progression.
For example:
Good Example
Acted as deputy team lead during manager absence, coordinating daily workflow for eight colleagues, resolving escalations and maintaining service levels during peak trading periods.
This is honest and strong. It shows readiness without exaggeration.
Tailoring does not mean rewriting your entire CV for every application. It means adjusting emphasis so the most relevant leadership evidence is easy to find.
Before applying, read the job description and identify:
The main leadership problem in the role
The size and type of team involved
Whether the role is strategic, operational or both
The key performance measures
The stakeholder environment
Any sector specific requirements
The tone of the employer
Then adjust your CV so your closest evidence appears early.
For example, if the role mentions change management repeatedly, your CV should not hide your transformation achievements halfway down page two. If the role is people heavy, show coaching, retention, performance management and team development. If the role is commercially focused, show budget, revenue, margin, cost saving, pricing, forecasting or growth responsibility.
What employers say versus what they mean can be different.
When a job advert says “fast paced environment”, it may mean the business is under resourced, growing quickly, dealing with ambiguity or expecting someone who can make decisions without perfect information.
When it says “strong stakeholder management”, it may mean you will need to handle competing opinions, senior pressure or difficult internal politics.
When it says “hands on leader”, it often means they want someone senior enough to lead but not so precious that they refuse operational work.
Your CV should respond to the reality behind the language, not just repeat the phrases back at them.
Keywords matter because recruiters, hiring managers and ATS platforms all rely on language matching to some extent. But keyword stuffing is not strategy. It is just panic with formatting.
Use keywords naturally in:
Your professional headline
Your leadership profile
Your core skills
Your role descriptions
Your achievement bullet points
Useful leadership CV keywords may include:
Leadership
Team management
People management
Performance management
Change management
Operational leadership
Strategic planning
Stakeholder engagement
Budget management
Coaching
Transformation
Process improvement
Commercial management
Governance
Risk management
Workforce planning
Talent development
Succession planning
Service delivery
Continuous improvement
Cross functional leadership
The important part is proof. If you include “change management”, your CV should show what changed, who was affected and what improved. If you include “budget management”, show the size or nature of the budget if possible. If you include “stakeholder engagement”, show who the stakeholders were and what you influenced.
A recruiter will forgive a missing buzzword if the evidence is strong. They will not forgive a CV full of impressive terminology with no substance behind it.
For most UK leadership applications, your CV should be clean, readable and ATS friendly. That does not mean ugly. It means the information should be easy to parse and easy for a human to read quickly.
Use:
Clear section headings
Reverse chronological career history
Standard job titles and dates
Simple formatting
Bullet points for achievements
Consistent spacing
A professional font
Word or PDF format, depending on application instructions
Avoid:
Heavy graphics
Text boxes that may not parse properly
Icons replacing words
Photos unless specifically relevant or requested
Overdesigned templates
Skill bars
Tiny margins
Dense paragraphs
Vague charts with no context
Skill bars are one of my personal recruitment irritations. “Leadership: 90%” means absolutely nothing. Who awarded the 90%? Was there a ceremony? Did leadership send a certificate? Use evidence instead.
Hiring managers want confidence. Not arrogance. Confidence.
They want to see that you understand the level of responsibility, have handled similar complexity and can create positive outcomes without needing constant direction.
In leadership hiring, they often assess:
Can this person manage the team we have, not just the team they wish they had?
Can they improve performance without damaging morale?
Can they handle difficult conversations?
Can they influence senior people without becoming political or passive?
Can they make decisions under pressure?
Can they balance people needs with business outcomes?
Can they bring structure without creating unnecessary bureaucracy?
Can they adapt to our organisation’s stage and culture?
This is where many leadership CVs fall flat. They present the candidate as polished, but not useful. A good leadership CV should make the hiring manager think: “This person has dealt with problems like ours.”
That is the real goal.
Many leadership CVs are not bad because the candidate lacks experience. They are bad because the experience is badly framed.
Common mistakes include:
Using too many leadership clichés
Listing responsibilities instead of achievements
Failing to show team size or scope
Hiding measurable outcomes
Making the CV too task focused
Writing a generic profile that could fit any manager
Including too much early career detail
Overloading the CV with keywords
Making the CV look more senior than the evidence supports
Ignoring the job description
Forgetting commercial or operational context
Using vague statements like “managed change” without explaining the change
Treating leadership as personality rather than impact
Another subtle mistake is writing only about what you delivered, but not how you led. For leadership roles, the “how” matters. Did you coach people? Build processes? Influence stakeholders? Set standards? Make difficult calls? Improve accountability? Bring calm to chaos? That is leadership evidence.
Use this simple framework when reviewing each role on your CV:
Scope
What were you responsible for? Include team size, function, location, budget, target, client group, project value or operational scale where relevant.
Challenge
What situation were you operating in? Growth, poor performance, restructure, high turnover, transformation, compliance pressure, customer complaints, system change or market uncertainty.
Action
What did you personally do as a leader? Coached, restructured, hired, influenced, improved, escalated, negotiated, planned, implemented, reviewed or built.
Impact
What changed? Performance, cost, revenue, retention, quality, engagement, delivery, customer outcomes, compliance, speed or confidence.
Relevance
Why does this matter for the role you want next? Make sure the evidence supports your target direction.
If a bullet point does not answer at least two of these areas, it may be too weak.
Before sending your leadership CV, ask yourself:
Can a recruiter understand my leadership level within 15 seconds?
Have I shown the size and scope of my responsibility?
Are my achievements specific enough to feel credible?
Have I shown people leadership, not just task ownership?
Have I included commercial, operational or strategic impact where relevant?
Is the CV tailored to the kind of leadership role I want next?
Have I removed generic phrases that do not prove anything?
Does my profile position me clearly?
Are my strongest achievements visible on the first page?
Does the CV sound like a real leader, not a leadership textbook?
A strong leadership CV should make your value obvious. Not inflated. Not dramatic. Obvious.
That is what gets interviews.
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.
Process improvement
Cross functional collaboration
Risk and compliance management
Employee engagement
Service delivery improvement
Transformation delivery
Senior stakeholder reporting
Conflict resolution
Hiring, onboarding and team development
Successful project delivery
Stronger stakeholder relationships
Improved audit results
Shorter onboarding time
Reduced absence
Higher promotion or internal mobility rates
Upload Resume
Import from Linkedin