Seven quick checks that decide whether a human ever sees your CV at all — plus templates built for your industry, if you'd rather skip the guesswork. Once it's ready, find a role to send it to, or read how others landed theirs.
A template plus a detailed guide, designed with ATS screening in mind. Buy just the one you'll use.
One fix, for your field.
Short for Applicant Tracking System — the software most companies use to collect and sort CVs. Before a person reads yours, it often scans it first, and it struggles with fancy layouts. Photos, columns and tables can come out as garbled text, or get skipped entirely. That's why plain and simple beats pretty here.
Use a normal layout, normal headings — Experience, Skills, Education — and save it as a PDF unless a Word file's specifically asked for. Try to echo some of the exact words used in the job advert, too: that's often what the system is matching your CV against.
Name and contact details at the top. Then a short intro — a couple of lines about you. Then work experience, most recent first. Then skills. Then education.
Two pages only if you've got years of experience to fill it. Otherwise, one page — every time.
Start each line with a doing-word — managed, created, sold, wrote. Say what you achieved, not just what you were told to do. Put a number on it wherever you can.
None of these help — and some of them confuse the ATS. Tap one to see why.
Check spelling and grammar twice yourself, then get someone else to check it too. A typo on page one is the fastest way to lose a reader who scans in seconds.
Tweak the wording to match each advert. It's the single most repeated piece of advice across everything out there on this — and most people still skip it.
