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Create ResumeA strong CV is not the one that says the most. It is the one that makes the hiring decision easier. In the UK job market, recruiters and hiring managers are usually scanning for relevance, evidence, level, progression, and risk. They want to know: can you do the job, have you done something similar before, and is there enough proof to justify an interview? My best recruiter CV tip is simple: stop writing your CV as a career history and start writing it as a relevance document. Your CV should quickly show why you fit this role, not just where you have worked. That means clear positioning, specific achievements, sensible keywords, and no vague professional theatre. Hiring teams do not have time to decode your potential. You need to make the fit obvious.
When I review a CV, I am not reading it like a biography. I am looking for signals.
That is the first thing many candidates misunderstand. A recruiter is not sitting there admiring every sentence. We are trying to answer a few practical questions quickly:
Is this person relevant for the role?
Do they have the right level of experience?
Have they worked in a similar environment, industry, function, or scale?
Is there evidence of impact?
Are there any gaps, inconsistencies, or unclear career moves that need checking?
Is this CV easy enough to trust?
That last one matters more than candidates realise. A CV does not need to be perfect, but it does need to feel credible. When a CV is vague, inflated, messy, or stuffed with generic buzzwords, it creates doubt. And doubt is expensive in hiring.
Candidates often try to make their CV do too much. They want it to explain their whole career, show personality, cover every task, impress every possible employer, and defend every career decision.
That is how CVs become bloated.
Your CV has one main job: get you invited to interview for a specific type of role.
Not every role. Not every company. Not every future possibility. A specific direction.
This is why generic CVs usually underperform. They are trying to appeal to everyone, so they end up being compelling to no one. A CV for a marketing manager role should not read like a general business support document. A CV for a finance analyst role should not hide analytical achievements behind vague teamwork statements. A CV for a senior operations role should not spend half a page describing basic admin tasks from ten years ago.
A hiring manager wants to know whether you match the problem they are hiring someone to solve.
That is the lens you should use when editing your CV.
Before you write or update anything, ask yourself:
What type of role am I targeting?
What problems does that role exist to solve?
What evidence do I have that I can solve those problems?
In UK recruitment, especially for competitive roles, the first CV screen is often a filtering exercise. Recruiters are not always looking for reasons to include you. Often, they are looking for reasons they can confidently shortlist you without embarrassment when they send your CV to the hiring manager.
That means your CV needs to do more than list responsibilities. It needs to reduce uncertainty.
A weak CV says:
Weak Example: Responsible for managing projects and supporting business objectives.
A stronger CV says:
Good Example: Managed six operational improvement projects across customer service and fulfilment, reducing average query resolution time by 28 percent within nine months.
The first version tells me you had duties. The second version tells me what you actually changed.
That is the difference between a CV that fills space and a CV that helps someone make a decision.
What would a recruiter need to see in the first 20 seconds to keep reading?
What would make a hiring manager feel safe interviewing me?
This is not about pretending to be someone you are not. It is about putting the most relevant evidence where it can actually be seen.
A CV is not a diary. It is a business case.
The profile section at the top of your CV is one of the most wasted spaces in job applications.
Too many candidates use it to write something like:
Weak Example: A hardworking, motivated and enthusiastic professional with excellent communication skills and a passion for delivering results.
This tells me almost nothing. It could belong to a graduate, a project manager, a receptionist, a sales director, or someone applying to be head of workplace nonsense. It is polished, but empty.
Your profile should answer three things quickly:
What are you?
What do you specialise in?
Why are you relevant to the role?
A better profile is specific, grounded, and aligned with the role you want.
Good Example: Commercially focused Account Manager with five years of experience managing B2B client portfolios across SaaS and professional services. Strong track record of improving retention, identifying upsell opportunities, and building senior stakeholder relationships across mid market and enterprise accounts.
This works because it gives me useful information immediately. I know the function, level, sector context, commercial focus, and likely role fit.
For the UK job market, keep your CV profile direct and practical. British hiring managers generally do not need dramatic personal branding. They need clarity.
Avoid profile phrases like:
Dynamic professional
Results driven individual
Works well independently and as part of a team
Excellent communicator
Passionate self starter
Proven track record without evidence
These phrases are not always wrong, but they are weak because they are unproven. If everyone says them, they stop meaning anything.
A better profile uses role specific evidence:
Commercial operations professional with experience improving reporting, sales processes, and CRM adoption
HR advisor with strong employee relations exposure across retail and multisite environments
Finance assistant experienced in reconciliations, month end support, invoice processing, and Excel based reporting
Senior product manager with experience leading roadmap strategy across regulated financial services products
Notice the difference. These profiles sound useful because they are anchored in actual work.
Recruiters often make an initial judgement before reaching the second page. That does not mean we never read the rest. It means the top section has to earn the read.
The first half page should make your relevance obvious.
It should usually include:
Your name and contact details
A clear professional title or target role
A sharp profile
Key skills that match the role
Your most recent or most relevant experience starting clearly
Do not waste prime CV space on full address details, date of birth, marital status, photos, or long personal statements. In the UK, these are unnecessary for most roles and can make the CV feel outdated.
Your location can be useful, especially for hybrid or office based roles, but you do not need your full address. City or region is enough.
For example:
Good Example: Manchester, UK | Available for hybrid roles | LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/name
If you are applying for remote roles, say so clearly where relevant. If you are relocating, do not let the recruiter guess.
Good Example: Currently based in Birmingham and relocating to London in September 2026.
That one line can prevent unnecessary rejection. Recruiters do not always have time to investigate your plans. If your location looks wrong for the role and you provide no context, they may move on.
This is one of those small CV details candidates underestimate. The issue is not that recruiters are being cruel. It is that unclear information creates friction, and friction quietly kills applications.
Applicant tracking systems matter, but candidates often misunderstand them.
Yes, your CV should include relevant keywords. No, you do not need to turn it into a keyword landfill.
In most UK recruitment processes, an ATS helps organise, search, and filter applications. It does not magically hire people. A human still needs to believe your CV makes sense.
Good keyword use means your CV naturally reflects the language of the role.
If the job advert asks for stakeholder management, budget tracking, CRM experience, Salesforce, Excel reporting, campaign delivery, compliance, procurement, or line management, and you genuinely have that experience, those terms should appear clearly in your CV.
But they should appear in context.
Weak Example: Skills: Leadership, communication, CRM, stakeholder management, reporting, teamwork, strategy, Microsoft Office, results driven, problem solving.
This is just a pile of terms. It gives me no confidence.
Good Example: Managed weekly Salesforce pipeline reporting for a team of 12 account managers, improving forecast accuracy and giving senior stakeholders clearer visibility of renewal risk.
That sentence includes keywords, but it also gives evidence.
The mistake candidates make is writing for the ATS at the expense of the human reader. The better approach is to write for both.
Use the job advert to identify the language that matters, then show that language through credible examples.
A practical way to do this:
Read three to five adverts for your target role
Highlight repeated skills, tools, responsibilities, and outcomes
Identify which ones you genuinely have
Place them naturally in your profile, skills section, and work experience
Remove irrelevant keywords that do not support your target direction
The goal is not to copy the job advert. The goal is to show alignment in language the recruiter can recognise quickly.
Most CVs are too responsibility heavy.
Candidates write what they were responsible for, but not what they achieved, improved, managed, influenced, delivered, reduced, increased, built, fixed, coordinated, analysed, or changed.
Responsibilities matter, especially if they show relevant scope. But responsibilities alone rarely make you stand out.
A responsibility says what sat on your desk. Evidence says what you did with it.
Weak Example: Responsible for managing social media channels.
Good Example: Managed LinkedIn and Instagram content calendars across three product brands, increasing average monthly engagement by 42 percent and supporting two successful product launches.
Weak Example: Assisted with recruitment.
Good Example: Coordinated end to end recruitment administration for 35 to 50 monthly vacancies, including interview scheduling, candidate communication, offer documentation, and ATS updates.
Weak Example: Worked on process improvement.
Good Example: Reviewed invoice approval workflow and introduced a tracker that reduced overdue approvals from 18 percent to 6 percent within one quarter.
The strongest CV bullet points usually combine:
Action
Scope
Method
Result
Relevance
You do not need all five every time, but you need enough detail to make the statement believable.
If you do not have numbers, use scale or context.
For example:
Supported month end reporting across three business units
Managed inbox volumes of up to 120 customer queries per day
Coordinated diaries for a leadership team of five
Delivered onboarding for new starters across UK and European offices
Handled supplier queries for contracts worth up to £250,000
Numbers help, but not every achievement needs to be a dramatic percentage increase. Sometimes scale, complexity, or ownership is the evidence.
This is where candidates often get stuck. They think achievements only mean awards, promotions, or huge revenue results. Not true. In recruitment, evidence can be anything that shows useful contribution.
If your work made something faster, clearer, safer, cheaper, better organised, more compliant, more profitable, more consistent, or less chaotic, that belongs on your CV.
A good CV bullet point should feel specific enough that it could not belong to just anyone.
That is my test.
If a bullet point could be copied and pasted onto 500 other CVs without looking out of place, it is probably too generic.
Weak Example: Provided excellent customer service in a fast paced environment.
That may be true, but it is not enough.
Good Example: Handled 60 to 80 daily customer enquiries across phone, email, and live chat, resolving billing, delivery, and account issues while maintaining a 94 percent customer satisfaction score.
Now I can picture the work. I understand the channels, volume, issue types, and performance standard.
For professional roles, the same rule applies.
Weak Example: Supported senior stakeholders with reporting.
Good Example: Prepared weekly performance dashboards for the sales leadership team, combining CRM, finance, and customer data to highlight pipeline movement, churn risk, and forecast gaps.
This gives the hiring manager something to believe.
The best CV bullet points usually avoid vague verbs like:
Helped
Assisted
Worked on
Involved in
Dealt with
Supported
Those words are not banned, but they are often too passive. Replace them where possible with clearer verbs:
Managed
Delivered
Coordinated
Analysed
Improved
Reduced
Increased
Built
Led
Implemented
The verb should match your actual level of ownership. Do not claim you led something if you only contributed to it. Recruiters notice inflated language, especially when the rest of the CV does not support it.
A CV should sell you, yes. But it should not oversell you into an awkward interview.
One of the biggest problems I see on CVs is unclear seniority.
A candidate may have strong experience, but the CV does not show whether they were operating at assistant, officer, manager, senior manager, lead, head of, or director level.
This matters because hiring managers are not only hiring skills. They are hiring level.
For example, “managed projects” could mean:
Coordinated project admin
Managed small internal workstreams
Led cross functional delivery
Owned budgets and timelines
Managed external suppliers
Reported to board level stakeholders
Delivered transformation across multiple sites
Those are very different levels of responsibility.
Your CV should make scope visible.
Add context such as:
Team size
Budget size
Client portfolio size
Revenue responsibility
Market or territory
Reporting line
Stakeholder level
Project scale
Tools and systems used
Complexity of environment
For example:
Weak Example: Managed a team and improved performance.
Good Example: Managed a team of eight customer service advisors across two shifts, improving first contact resolution from 71 percent to 84 percent through coaching, quality reviews, and clearer escalation processes.
That tells me the candidate has actual people management experience, not just informal supervision.
For senior candidates, this becomes even more important. If you are applying for leadership roles, your CV needs to show strategic impact, not just activity. Hiring managers want to see the size of the problems you have handled.
For junior candidates, scope still matters. You may not have managed budgets or teams, but you can show volume, pace, tools, stakeholders, coursework, internships, placements, or transferable experience.
The question is always the same: what should the recruiter understand about the level you were working at?
Do not make them guess.
Tailoring your CV does not mean rewriting the whole document for every job. That is the advice people give when they want candidates to suffer unnecessarily.
A better approach is to create a strong base CV for your target role, then adjust the parts that influence relevance most.
The sections worth tailoring are:
Profile
Key skills
First three to five bullet points under your most relevant role
Job title positioning if your role title is unclear
Order of achievements
Tools, systems, sector keywords, and specialist terminology
For example, if you are applying for a project coordinator role, your first bullet points should not focus mainly on diary management if you have stronger project tracking, stakeholder coordination, reporting, and documentation experience.
If you are applying for a sales role, your commercial results should not be buried under admin tasks.
If you are applying for an HR role, employee relations, onboarding, HR systems, policy support, and stakeholder advisory work should be easy to find.
Tailoring is about emphasis, not invention.
The hiring manager should feel like your CV was written for the type of role they are filling. Not because you copied their advert, but because the evidence lines up naturally.
A useful recruiter test is this:
Could someone identify your target role from your CV without seeing the job advert?
If the answer is no, your positioning is too vague.
Many candidates bury their strongest selling points.
I see CVs where the profile is generic, the skills section is bland, the first role has vague duties, and then halfway down page two there is a brilliant achievement that should have been obvious from the start.
That is a missed opportunity.
Recruiters scan in priority order. Recent experience usually gets the most attention. The top third of page one gets the most attention. Clear job titles get attention. Numbers get attention. Recognisable tools, industries, and employers get attention. Strong achievement language gets attention.
Use that reality.
Your best evidence should appear early, especially if it directly matches the role.
For example, if the job requires Power BI and you have used Power BI commercially, do not hide it in a long skills list at the bottom. Show it in context near the relevant role.
Good Example: Built Power BI dashboards tracking regional sales performance, margin movement, and customer retention, reducing manual reporting time by two days per month.
That is much stronger than simply writing “Power BI” in a skills section.
If you have a career change, this becomes even more important. Recruiters may not immediately see the connection between your previous job and your target role. You need to bridge the gap for them.
For example:
Good Example: Moving from retail management into HR, with practical experience handling absence management, rota planning, onboarding, performance conversations, and employee relations escalations across a team of 25.
That gives the recruiter a reason to keep reading.
Do not assume they will work it out. In busy hiring processes, they often will not.
Career gaps, short roles, and career changes are not automatic dealbreakers. Confusing CVs are the bigger problem.
The issue is rarely that someone had a gap. The issue is that the CV leaves the recruiter unsure what happened.
In the UK market, career gaps are common. Redundancy, caring responsibilities, relocation, health issues, study, maternity leave, contract work, and career breaks all happen. You do not need to disclose private details, but you should remove unnecessary mystery.
For example:
Good Example: Career break for family caring responsibilities, January 2024 to September 2024.
Good Example: Fixed term contract completed as planned.
Good Example: Redundancy following company restructure.
Good Example: Relocated to the UK and now seeking permanent roles in operations coordination.
These short explanations are usually enough.
What does not work is trying to disguise gaps with strange formatting. Recruiters notice. If dates are missing, inconsistent, or only shown in years, it can create more concern than the gap itself.
For career changes, explain the connection between your old experience and new direction. Do not make the CV feel like two unrelated stories glued together.
If you are moving from teaching into learning and development, show training design, stakeholder management, facilitation, assessment, curriculum planning, and learner outcomes.
If you are moving from hospitality into customer success, show client communication, issue resolution, retention, service recovery, systems use, and commercial awareness.
If you are moving from recruitment into HR, show employee lifecycle exposure, compliance, stakeholder advice, onboarding, interview processes, and policy awareness.
The point is not to pretend your background is identical. The point is to make the transferable evidence obvious.
A good CV format should not make the recruiter work harder.
I know design templates look appealing, especially the ones with icons, columns, graphics, profile bars, and tiny text boxes. But many of them are poor for ATS parsing and annoying for human screening.
For most UK applications, use a clean CV format with:
Clear section headings
Reverse chronological work history
Standard fonts
Consistent spacing
Bullet points under each role
Dates with month and year where possible
Two pages for most experienced professionals
One page only if you are early career and genuinely have limited experience
PDF format unless the employer asks for Word
Avoid:
Photos unless specifically appropriate for your industry or location
Graphics, logos, and skill bars
Two column layouts that break parsing
Excessive colours
Tiny font sizes
Large blocks of text
Tables that confuse screening systems
Personal details that are not relevant to hiring
Skill bars are a particular irritation. A bar showing that you are 80 percent good at Excel tells me nothing, except that someone has bravely quantified vibes. Use evidence instead.
Weak Example: Excel: 90 percent
Good Example: Used Excel, including pivot tables, XLOOKUP, and conditional formatting, to reconcile monthly sales reports across 12 regional teams.
Formatting should support the content, not compete with it.
The best CVs are easy to read quickly and still strong when read carefully. That is the balance.
There is a difference between positioning yourself well and exaggerating.
Strong CV writing is not about making every task sound huge. It is about showing the value in your actual work.
A junior candidate does not need to pretend they led business transformation. A senior candidate does not need to list every admin task to prove they worked hard. A career changer does not need to hide their background. A candidate returning after a break does not need to apologise for existing.
Your CV should be confident, not desperate.
Recruiters can usually sense when language has been inflated beyond reality. The interview exposes it quickly.
For example:
Weak Example: Spearheaded strategic transformation across the organisation.
If the role was actually admin support for a small internal project, this will not survive questioning.
Good Example: Supported an internal process improvement project by tracking actions, updating stakeholders, preparing meeting notes, and maintaining project documentation.
That is honest, useful, and still valuable.
The strongest candidates are not always the ones with the fanciest language. They are the ones whose CV makes their fit easy to understand and easy to trust.
Hiring managers appreciate clarity. Recruiters appreciate evidence. ATS systems appreciate relevant language. Your CV needs to satisfy all three without becoming awkward.
Some CV mistakes are obvious. Others are subtle but damaging.
The biggest issue is usually not one typo or one imperfect sentence. It is the overall impression the CV creates.
Here are the mistakes I see most often.
A generic CV usually sounds polished but says very little. It has broad skills, vague responsibilities, and no clear target role.
The result is that recruiters cannot place you easily.
In recruitment, unclear positioning is a problem because recruiters are often matching against a specific brief. If your CV makes you look like “a bit of everything”, you may be overlooked for candidates who look clearly aligned.
A CV full of duties tells me what your job description was. It does not tell me whether you were any good at it.
You do not need an achievement for every bullet point, but you do need enough evidence to show contribution.
Phrases like “leveraged synergies”, “driving excellence”, “passionate about innovation”, and “delivering best in class solutions” often make a CV weaker.
They sound impressive until you ask: what does this actually mean?
Plain, specific language is stronger.
A five page CV is not automatically more impressive. Often, it just means the candidate has not prioritised.
For most UK professionals, two pages is enough. Senior executives, academics, consultants, contractors, and technical specialists may need more, but only where the extra detail genuinely supports the application.
Contract roles are normal, but unexplained short stints can look unstable.
Label them clearly.
Good Example: Fixed term contract
Good Example: Interim role
Good Example: Agency contract
Good Example: Consultancy project
This prevents the recruiter from assuming every short role ended badly.
Recruiters screen for relevance. Hiring managers read for capability.
Your CV needs to satisfy both. If it is too keyword focused, it may pass a search but fail the human judgement test. If it is beautifully written but missing key terms, it may not be found or shortlisted.
The best CV sits in the middle: searchable, readable, specific, and credible.
The strongest CVs I see are not always the most decorated. They are the clearest.
They usually have these qualities:
The target role is obvious
The profile is specific
Recent experience is easy to understand
Key skills match the role
Achievements are evidenced
Dates and job titles are clear
Career moves make sense or are briefly explained
Formatting is simple
The tone is confident without sounding inflated
The CV feels written for a real hiring decision, not a generic template
A strong CV also answers objections before they become concerns.
If you are changing careers, it explains the transferable logic.
If you are relocating, it clarifies your plan.
If you have contract roles, it labels them properly.
If your job title is unusual, it explains the function.
If your experience is broad, it prioritises the relevant parts.
If you are senior, it shows scale and leadership impact.
If you are early career, it shows potential through evidence, not empty enthusiasm.
This is what candidates often miss. A CV is not just about adding positive information. It is also about reducing the reasons someone might hesitate.
When I review a CV, I think in terms of relevance, proof, clarity, and risk.
You can use the same framework before applying.
Does your CV clearly match the type of role you are applying for?
Check whether your profile, skills, and first page reflect the job description. If your most relevant experience is hidden, move it higher.
Ask yourself: would a recruiter understand my fit in 20 seconds?
Have you provided evidence, not just claims?
Replace vague statements with examples, numbers, scope, tools, stakeholders, or outcomes.
Ask yourself: what proves I can do this?
Is the CV easy to read and understand?
Check job titles, company names, dates, locations, section headings, and formatting. Remove anything that creates confusion.
Ask yourself: where might a recruiter pause or question something?
Does anything on the CV create avoidable concern?
This could be unexplained gaps, unclear employment dates, inflated language, missing location context, inconsistent formatting, or achievements that sound too vague to trust.
Ask yourself: what might make a hiring manager hesitate?
This framework works because it mirrors how hiring decisions happen. Recruiters are not just looking for talent. They are looking for fit, evidence, and confidence.
Some CV improvements take deep work. Others are quick but powerful.
Start with these:
Replace your generic profile with a role specific summary
Move your strongest relevant achievements to the top half of page one
Add numbers, scale, tools, or context to vague bullet points
Remove outdated personal details
Use clear job titles and employment dates
Match your skills section to your target role
Cut old or irrelevant detail from early career roles
Explain gaps or short contracts briefly
Remove buzzwords that do not prove anything
Save the CV as a clean PDF unless the employer asks otherwise
Check that your CV still reads properly when copied into plain text
That last point is useful because ATS systems often parse CVs into plain text. If your CV becomes nonsense when stripped of formatting, it may not perform well.
The goal is not perfection. The goal is fewer barriers.
A recruiter should not have to hunt for your relevance. A hiring manager should not have to guess your impact. Your CV should make the strongest version of your case quickly, clearly, and honestly.
The best CV advice I can give is this: write for the decision being made, not the document being produced.
A CV is not there to impress you. It is there to help a recruiter and hiring manager understand your relevance quickly enough to interview you.
That means every section should earn its place.
Your profile should position you. Your skills should match the role. Your experience should show evidence. Your achievements should prove impact. Your formatting should make reading easy. Your career story should feel clear enough to trust.
Most weak CVs are not weak because the candidate has nothing to offer. They are weak because the useful evidence is buried under generic language, poor structure, and unclear positioning.
Hiring is not always fair, efficient, or perfectly logical. Plenty of good candidates get missed because their CV does not translate their value clearly enough. That is frustrating, but it is also fixable.
Your job is to remove the guesswork.
Show the reader what you do, where you add value, what level you operate at, and why your experience fits the role. Do that well, and your CV stops being a formality. It becomes a proper argument for interview.
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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