If you’re lucky, hiring managers are going to spend mere moments looking at your C.V. A lot of positions are filled through networks, that’s how I got two of mine, which is why connections, references, introductions, and recruiters are so valuable. When you have a direct route to the right person your C.V is less of an application and more of an interesting thing that few people will actually read. 

But, statistically (I’m making this up but it sounds right) that’s less common than the old fashioned way; get a CV in front of someone, and ask for a chat. Be brave, be bold, be whatever, just get the page in front of them and make saying ‘yes’ to a chat easy. (Notice I said ‘chat’ not ‘interview’ for example.)

Either way, a C.V needs to be good and the best way to explain what makes one good is to think through the worst/most common scenario; the dreaded, cold job application. No connections, no introductions, just a /careers URL, or a LinkedIn form. This is article is not job or industry specific, a good C.V is a good C.V. You should tailor the contents for you but the basics are fundamental.

In general

The best way to tackle writing a good C.V is the same as writing any other bit of formal writing. Start with a skeleton, fill it until the words run out, and then slim it down, chop it up, and cut around until it’s good. Then, sleep on it, and cut it some more. 

There are only three sections that actually matter, or that anyone will care about. The rest is nice to have, maybe fun reading, maybe it's useful from a design perspective or as a conversation starter, but if you don’t get these three things right, you’re buggered. 

Details section

A lot of recruiting tools or forms will try to make this one redundant by asking for things like email addresses, visa statuses, and years of experience elsewhere in the application process. But as a hiring manager you want to do as few clicks and as little reading as possible. Having this stuff built-in is important. 

This section does two things, it implies you are indeed a verifiable human being who can be contacted (this is very reassuring, consciously and subconsciously for the hiring manager) and it’s a stand-in for later. Assuming things go well, in order for people to easily reach out to you without trawling through recruiting software or talking to their HR department, they need to know how to get in touch. 

It should be small, clear, and at the top of the page somewhere. It should not draw the eye, but needs to be readable. Mine currently looks like this: 

Profile or summary

Whatever you want to call it, this is the only real bit of reading anyone can be expected to do. This section needs to tell them exactly what you are. Yes, what you are. If you can get it to tell them who you are as well, that’s nice, but it’s more important to focus on the what. They’re going to be looking to filter you into either the ‘reject’ or ‘keep reading’ category, make it easy for them. 

This section needs to be clear, concise and give everything they need to know upfront. Don’t waste your words or their time, if they’re not interested, they can move on, but if you are what they’re looking for, the eyebrows need to rise. This is your first chance to hook them. 

For this reason, this is the hardest one to get right and unfortunately what hooks one hiring manager might be something completely different from another. You don’t have enough information to know. My advice is simple; make it simple, make it honest, make the bits you think are important bold, and cross your fingers. The absolute maximum is five sentences. Here is mine:   

Experience

This is the meat and potatoes. It’s boring but if they’re reading this section you’re doing well, so don’t fuck it up now. The point of this one is to show that not only are you a human who seems to be what they’re looking for, but that you have also done things before. Like it says on the tin, you have experience. And hopefully the experience they’re looking for. 

The structure is simple, you need to list all of your relevant experience and for each stint include: your title, the organisation, the dates you were there, and optionally, (though I recommend it) the location/city. Then you want clean, clear, short bullet points that are as quantitative as possible for each listed experience. 

What qualifies as ‘relevant’ is up to you and obviously hinges on how much experience you actually have but remember, the point here isn’t to tell your life story, they don’t care. The point is to show that you know how to do the stuff they need doing. Focus on that. 

Quantitative means the sentence follows this structure:

[Positive adjective] [some really important thing] by [some metric] by [action]

For example: 

Increased revenue selling luxury yachts by 1000% by looking great in a mankini

Or:

Improved customer wait time in McDonalds by 2.4 minutes by training cashiers to politely interrupt rambling customers

I don’t have an example for this bit because the finished look depends on the next section so here’s a different image that’s really just for the thumbnail of this post: 

Refine

Once you’ve done all of that, if you’re not happy with it yet, add to it. Don’t be afraid of length or sentence quality just yet, write everything that you think could be important or interesting. Once you’ve written everything you want to say, or better yet, everything you could possibly say about each experience, you can start to refine it. 

Use the previously mentioned sentence structure as a base and turn your ramblings and writings into a short summary (no more than three sentences) and 4-5 crisp bullet points for each role. And for goodness sake, prioritise, there is no such thing as an unordered list, put the most important stuff at the top. 

Typically you’ll finish the ‘experience’ section first, this makes sense because then you can use all of the thinking and experience you just wrote to inform the ‘profile’ or ‘summary’ section. As mentioned in that section this needs to be very straightforward and tell the person what you are, but having done this exercise, hopefully you can work in who you are too. 

Here is an example for my current role at South Pole:

Design

Don’t let anyone tell you design isn’t important. It is. I’m not proud of it but I have disregarded plenty of potential hires because their C.V looked shit. This thing is supposed to represent you, I know it doesn’t, I know you’re more than words on a page, and you have hopes and dreams and stuff and but when all I have is words on a page and tens or hundreds of other words-on-page-people, I’ll judge you by how pretty those words are. 

I’m not a designer, I won’t give advice on how to design your C.V but I personally use, and strongly recommend, that you use a template from online somewhere, use Figma if you know how or are willing to learn, and for goodness sake include colour. 

P.S unless you are applying to Harvard, or for some reason you have to, don’t use the Harvard template, it looks shit. 

Other hints and tips

Someone recently asked me to review and critique their C.V, that’s where this post came from. A lot of the feedback I had was specific to their document in particular and was hard to talk about in these other sections, so I’m just going to leave some of that advice here verbatim in case it’s useful to you. 

• Unless you’re applying in the Middle East we read from left to right, put the good stuff on the left, the sidebar on the right. To be clear the good stuff is what tells me about you, not URLs or email addresses  
• ‘A product professional in it for the customers. Striving to build products that deliver exceptional experiences whilst solving real world problems’ is literally all fluff, it tells me nothing about you other than you want to be a product person. But I don’t care what you want to be, I care what you are.  
• Tell me what I don’t know.
• Make sure you save these things as PDFs, not word documents or Google documents otherwise the formatting can be screwy.

Conclusion

There are plenty of other sections that could be interesting, some people have a picture of themselves, some people have a ‘side projects’ section, a ‘certifications section’ a ‘skills and competencies’ section with a rating scale, and lots more. But those are only flavour. They only matter if you can get the person looking at your C.V hooked and interested. 

The best way to do that is by having a details section that makes it clear you’re real, a summary section that puts you in the ‘keep reading’ bucket, and an experience section that says ‘yes indeed, I can do what you need me to do, look, I’ve done it before’. 

After that you can include whatever you want but please, make sure your C.V is designed and has a splash of colour. It might not matter to some hiring managers but fuck, looking at C.Vs can be dull. Good luck.