How to refresh your CV to stand out

In a competitive job market such as the one we currently find ourselves in, ensuring that your CV is an accurate reflection of who you are and what you can do is really important. Recruiters and hiring managers will look at dozens of CVs every day, often spending mere seconds scanning through them before deciding to read on (or not). Even if you're not in the middle of a job search right now, taking a few hours to update your CV means you're prepared when the right opportunity comes along.

When you haven’t updated your CV in a while, it can be hard to know where to start. What experiences and accomplishments should you include for the jobs you’ve got your eye on? What new CV rules and trends should you be following? And should it be one page or two?

Well, search no more: We’ve compiled our top 5 CV tips you need into one place. Read on for advice and tricks that’ll make sure you craft a winning CV—and help you land a job.

1. Know your audience

One of the most common mistakes people make when writing their CV is to create one CV for all jobs. Hiring managers will often spend only 30 seconds skimming over a CV and if they have to look for what’s relevant to them and the role they’re hiring for, they are likely to pass you over. You need to make it easy for them to make the link between your past and your potential future impact in that specific organisation. More often than not, people create a CV thinking it’s the opportunity to list out everything they’ve ever done and show off how great they are in so many ways. The reality is that your CV really isn’t about you, it’s about what you can do for the employer. It’s about how you can help them uniquely with the task at hand.

Keep that in mind when you’re writing your CV. Focus on the employer when you’re choosing the right bullet points, roles, and achievements you list out. What are their challenges they need help with? Where are their pain points? What are their goals? How can you help them with these? What skills have you acquired that could positively impact them? Your CV should read like the perfect person to solve all of their problems, it should read like a no brainer because you’ve demonstrated all the necessary skills in previous roles or experiences.

Our tip: Use their colours, font and branding in your CV to draw their attention in. Mirror the language they use in their job description, subconsciously it helps to cement that you are their kind of person.

2. Tell a good story.

When people tell a story, others slow down and listen. Your job with your CV is to get the reader to think of you as a human being, rather than a piece of paper in a pile that they need to read through. We are hardwired for stories, stories are how we understand the world and our place within it. A great CV tells the story of how you got where you are, and why that makes you the perfect person for a given role. To create a solid story for your CV, you’ll need to think carefully about the storyline and themes you want to share including relevant accomplishments, experience, and skills. How did you get where you are? How did you build the hard-won skills that will make you excel in this role? If you don’t think carefully about the narrative of your CV and actively craft it, the person reading your CV will make up their own story. If there is any randomness in the CV, they might make up a story that you’re not relevant for what they’re looking for.

A good CV story is perfectly relevant for the role it was written for, with everything that doesn’t support the story omitted from the CV. Many people think that they need to put every role on their CV, but if that piece of experience or skill doesn’t support the story you’re trying to tell, leave it off! Don’t give anyone reason to discount you. Think about the themes and the important experiences that led you to being capable for this particular role, and leave the rest for another day.

Our tip: Write out the story you want to tell first on a piece of paper (or digitally of course!), use the classic story format “once upon a time”, and write out the story of all the trials and tribulations that have brought you to being the perfect person for the role you’re applying for. You don’t need to share it with anyone, it’s for you to get clear on what the most relevant parts of your story are, and to use when you’re ordering your CV and choosing which accomplishments to highlight.

3. Keep it interesting

An employer or recruiter might spend 10-60 seconds skimming through your CV. That’s not long to grab their attention, and not long for them to see all the wonderful things you’ve done in your career. With a CV skimmability is key. With this in mind, it’s even more important to make sure that the main things you want to get across are easily found on your CV. If there are 3 things that you want them to immediately know about you, make sure those are prominent and not mixed amongst too much text. If someone looked at your CV for just 30 seconds, you have to be really clear what you want them to see, and to make those few key things really interesting. You want them to have a quick look at your CV, see something cool you’ve done, and then take the time to read more about you or invite you in for an interview. There is an element of intrigue you have to create with your CV, pick out things that are worth paying attention to and put them out front and centre.

Our tip: Watch someone else look at your CV, where does the eye skip to? What are they drawn to? At what point do they stop paying attention? Be considerate in what you include “Above the Fold” . In marketing speak, “above the fold” refers to what you see on the front half of a folded newspaper (or, in the digital age, before you scroll down on a website), but basically, it’s your first impression of a document. In CV speak, it means you should make sure your best experiences and accomplishments are visible on the top third of your CV. This top section is what the hiring manager is going to see first—and what will serve as a hook for someone to keep on reading. So focus on putting your best, most relevant experiences first.

4. Stand out from the crowd.

The days of plain CVs being effective are over. With technology having moved on as it has, it’s no longer the norm to have a very plain CV. If a hiring manager is spending so little time looking through your CV, get creative with how it looks, how it’s laid out and how you are presenting yourself. If you’re trying to get across a specific trait or characteristic, your CV can be a great way of demonstrating those skills. If you want people to think you’re creative, innovative, good at communication, you can demonstrate all of those skills through the format of your CV. As a general rule, it is good to have some elements stand out amongst the rest of the page so that you stand out amongst potentially hundreds of other applicants. If you’re applying for a very traditional role or organisation, you can still keep it professional without it being boring. Make use of colour, graphs and other mediums to show off what you want to show off. Traditional doesn’t have to mean boring.

Our tip: Go through your CV and identify which sections you could visualise with a graph. The use of graphs can help draw in the eye and is easy to do with CV tools like Enhancv, Canva, and CVup. Challenge yourself to visualise some of the sections of your CV with graphs such as the ones you see below. These graphs were created by Catherine Madden in her Skillshare course, ‘Visualising Your Resume’.

5. Avoid clichés and buzzwords

More often than not, when you read through a CV it’s full of buzzwords. Buzzwords are filler words used to describe you and what you can do. For example: hard-working, proactive, detail-oriented, passionate, etc. The problem with buzzwords is not that the traits you say you have are inherently bad, but the issue is that they are subjective. If you say that you’re detail-oriented, you might be, but you might not be detail-oriented in the same way that someone else might expect. Recruiters and hiring managers have read all these buzzwords so often on CVs and in cover letters that the words don’t have the same effect. The issue is that everyone says they have those traits, and therefore it doesn’t really mean anything. They often have the opposite effect that you’re trying to have on people, they can put people off and make them switch off as they’re reading your CV. Don’t tell them how great you are, show them.

Go through and think about how you might be able to demonstrate that you have the traits you want to show. Think of tangible metrics from your past that demonstrates that you’re organised, hard-working, detail-oriented, or whatever else you want to come across. A great CV is one that shows what someone is like through what they’ve actually done. If you’re unsure what a buzzword might be, and what to say instead, check out the image below.

Our tip: Replace every buzzword in your CV with a metric or piece of evidence that demonstrates what you’re trying to say. Show them what you’ve done and let the results speak for themselves. Less is more on a CV, you don’t want loads of words, you want the things you’ve done to stand out and speak for themselves. Numbers and tangible outputs are always better than more text!

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As you go through this process, remember that ultimately hiring managers look for three things on your CV, “What did you do? Why did you do it? And what was the result?” If you can answer all three of these questions, you’re going to be on the right track. 

There's always more you can do with a CV, but it's important to take it step by step, otherwise, it can feel a bit overwhelming. Our final piece of advice to you for 2021 is to remind you that your CV should be a living document that you change and update regularly. This practice makes the task of rejigging it for job applications much easier and less stressful. Get into the habit of adding to it every month or quarter to reflect your recent achievements or projects, this will help you to be ready to make the most of opportunities when they come up.

If you need a bit more guidance or further step by step instructions to write an amazing CV, check out our online course where you'll find tips and advice as well as worksheets to help you create a standout CV. Find out more and sign up here.