Nobody reads your CV the way you write it. You spend a weekend agonising over the wording of a bullet about your summer job. The person on the other end opens it, scans it, and makes one decision: is this worth twenty more minutes of my time?
That is the whole job of a CV. It is not a biography and it is not an argument. It is a screening document, and it is competing against several thousand others that all say hardworking and detail oriented. If you have no finance experience, no internship, and one part time job, you are not out of the running. You are in exactly the position most successful applicants were in a year before they got the offer. You just have to write the page properly.
— one page, and stop negotiating with yourself
One page. Not one page plus a footer, not two pages because the second one is only half full. If you are an undergraduate applying for a spring week or a summer internship, a second page reads as a failure to prioritise, which is the exact opposite of the thing you are trying to prove.
The constraint is doing something useful. It forces you to decide what actually matters, and that decision is the one the reader was going to make anyway. Make it yourself, in advance, in your favour.
— the order the page should be in
Education goes at the top. Not because your degree is the most interesting thing about you, but because the first filter is usually numeric, and you want the numbers found in two seconds rather than hunted for.
- Education. University, course, expected grade, graduation year. Then A levels or equivalent with grades, and GCSEs as a single line if they are strong.
- Work experience. Anything you were paid for. Retail, hospitality, tutoring, a family business, freelance work. All of it counts.
- Positions and activities. Societies, sports teams, volunteering, a course project, something you built.
- Skills and interests. Two or three lines at most, at the bottom.
If you have genuinely relevant experience, promote it above education. Almost nobody applying for a first internship does, and pretending otherwise is transparent.
— how to write a bullet when your only job was a pub shift
Here is where most student CVs fall apart. The bullets describe the job, not the person doing it. "Served customers and handled cash" tells the reader what the role was. They already knew what the role was. It says nothing about you.
Every bullet should follow the same shape: what you did, at what scale, and what changed because you did it. Scale is the part people skip, and it is the part that makes a bar job sound like a competence rather than a chore.
Neither version is a lie. The second one just answers the questions the first one leaves open. Nothing was invented, and the person did exactly the same job in both.
— you have numbers, you just have not looked
Students tell us they have nothing to quantify because they never touched revenue. You are looking for the wrong numbers. Every role has size, speed, money or people in it somewhere:
- how many customers, covers, orders or tickets in a shift
- how many people you managed, trained, taught or recruited
- the value of the till, the budget, the stock or the fundraise
- how many hours a week you worked alongside full time study
- how much something grew, or how much time or cost you saved
Work them out honestly and round down. If you cannot find a number for a bullet, find the outcome instead. If there is no number and no outcome, the bullet is probably not earning its line.
— what to delete today
Space on a one page CV is the most expensive space you own. These take up room and give nothing back:
- a photo, your date of birth, your nationality and your full postal address
- "References available on request", which is assumed
- a personal statement or objective at the top, which is a cover letter in the wrong place
- skill rating bars, five stars out of five for Excel, and anything with a chart in it
- "Proficient in Microsoft Word", and any other claim that is true of everyone
- the word passionate, in every form it takes
City, phone, email and a LinkedIn URL is the entire header you need. Use an email address that is your name.
— the formatting rules exist for a machine
Plenty of large schemes push your CV through a parser before a human sees it, which lifts your details into a form. Anything clever in the layout is where that goes wrong, and a parsed CV with three empty fields looks like a careless applicant rather than a broken tool.
- one column, no tables, no text boxes, no icons
- nothing in the header or footer of the document, because parsers often skip them
- standard section headings that say exactly what they are
- a normal typeface at 10 to 11 point, with margins you have not crushed to 1cm
- send a PDF unless the form demands otherwise, and name the file Firstname Lastname CV.pdf
A CV that looks designed is competing on the wrong thing. Make it plain, then make the sentences good.
— tailoring, without rewriting it every time
You do not need a new CV per application. You need one strong CV and about ten minutes per firm. Open the job description, find the two or three things it actually asks for, and make sure those words appear on your page where they are honestly true.
Reorder your bullets so the most relevant one sits first under each role, because the first line of each block is the one that gets read properly. If the description leans on teamwork under pressure, the bar shift on a Friday night is your best bullet, so put it at the top of that block rather than third.
— the check that catches most of it
Before you send it, read only the first line of every block and nothing else. That is roughly what the first pass looks like. If those six or seven lines do not add up to a person worth twenty minutes, no amount of detail further down is going to rescue it.
Then two more passes. Read it out loud, which finds every sentence that sounds like it was written to impress rather than to inform. And hand it to somebody who does not know you, then ask them what you actually did in each role. If they cannot tell you, the bullet is not doing its job yet.
Your CV is the cheapest part of this process to get right. It is one page, you write it once, and it goes out fifty times. Fix it in August and every application after that starts from something solid.