CV Mastery

Your CV has one job: get you the interview. It isn't your life story, and it isn't a personal statement in bullet form. A recruiter reading two hundred applications for one internship isn't looking to be dazzled — they're looking for a reason to keep going.

In that first glance they want three things answered: what are you studying, where have you been, and is there any real evidence you can do the job. If the top third of the page doesn't answer all three, the rest of the page rarely gets read.

Start from something clean rather than a blank page. This is the template we use with students — one page, ATS-friendly, no columns or icons that trip up parsers. Edit it in Word or Google Docs, then export as PDF.

Most strong UK student CVs share the same skeleton. Deviate when you have a good reason — not because a template on Instagram looked pretty.

1. Header — name, one-line summary, city, email, phone, LinkedIn URL. No photo, no DOB.
2. Education — most recent first, with predicted or achieved grades and one line of relevant modules or projects.
3. Experience — roles reverse-chronologically, three bullets each, action-verb + task + measurable result.
4. Extra-curriculars — societies, competitions, sport. Treat these like jobs.
5. Skills & interests — language levels, technical tools, one line of genuine interests.

This is the single biggest lever on the page. Weak bullets describe duties. Strong bullets describe what actually happened because you were there.

A simple pattern works: an active verb, the thing you did, and something concrete that came out of it. A number is best, but ‘adopted by the team’ or ‘still in use a year later’ works too.

A big chunk of graduate schemes now run your CV through an Applicant Tracking System before any human sees it. Most of them do fairly dumb keyword matching against the job description — which is good news, because it means you can prepare for it.

• Save as PDF — but a clean, text-based PDF, not an image.
• Use standard section headings: Education, Experience, Skills.
• No tables, columns, text-boxes or icons. Half of them break the parser silently.
• Mirror language from the job description — if they say ‘stakeholder management’, use those words, not a synonym.
• One readable font (Calibri, Arial, Georgia, Helvetica). No graphics, no headshot.

Keep one master CV with every bullet you could ever use. For each application, read the job description, mark the five or six things it keeps coming back to, and reorder your existing bullets so the top of each role speaks to those things.

That should take ten minutes, not two hours. If you find yourself rewriting the whole thing every time, the master CV isn’t good enough yet.

• ‘Hardworking, motivated, team player.’ Everyone says it, so nobody reads it.
• A list of modules with no grades and no context — the recruiter can’t tell what you actually learned.
• A UCAS-style personal statement at the top. Save that energy for the cover letter.
• Grade 3 piano at age 11, or Duke of Edinburgh Bronze from six years ago.
• Tenses that flip mid-role — pick past or present per job and stick to it.
• A photo. Never, in the UK.

AI is a decent editor and a terrible author. It’s useful when you already have a bullet and want to tighten it, swap a repeated verb, or spot a sentence you’ve fused together by accident. That’s it.

Don’t paste a job description in and ask a chatbot to write your CV. Recruiters read hundreds of them a week and can spot the patterns from the doorway — phrases like ‘spearheaded cross-functional initiatives’, ‘synergised outcomes’, ‘demonstrated a proven track record’. The moment a bullet sounds like a corporate press release, the CV is done.