How to Write a CV That Actually Gets Replies
Aminata Kamara
A recruiter scanning fifty applications gives each one about six seconds before deciding which pile it goes in. Six seconds. Your CV is not your life story and it is not a confession of everything you have ever done. It is a one-page advertisement for the value you bring, built to survive that six-second scan and earn a longer read. Once you accept that, everything about how you write it changes.
Lead with results, not duties
Anyone can list responsibilities. "Responsible for social media." "Handled customer enquiries." "Assisted with events." These tell a recruiter what your job title already told them, and they prove nothing. What stands out is impact, written with a number attached.
Instead of "responsible for social media," write "grew the page from 200 to 3,000 followers in four months." Instead of "handled customer enquiries," write "resolved 40 enquiries a day with a 95 percent satisfaction rating." Numbers make you believable, because numbers are hard to fake and easy to picture. If you did something and you can count it, count it.
The formula
Action verb + what you did + the result with a number. "Built a website that brought the shop 12 new orders in its first month."
No experience? Use projects
If you are early in your career, a Projects section beats an empty Experience section every time. Recruiters know you are starting out. What they want to see is evidence that you can actually do the thing, and a project is that evidence. A website you built, a community event you organised, a small business you ran on WhatsApp, a dataset you analysed for a class, all of it counts. Show what you made and what it achieved.
This is the great equaliser. You do not need a company to give you permission to build proof. You can manufacture it this weekend. Redo a real local shop’s problem as a sample project, build the thing, and write up the before and the after. Work you can show beats work you merely claim.
Free tool
The Teki-SL CV Builder formats all of this for you and exports a clean PDF. Use it instead of fighting with margins in a Word document.
Make it easy to scan
A wall of text loses the six-second test instantly. The eye needs landing spots. Use a clear name and a one-line headline at the top, then short sections with bold headings, then bullet points that each start with a strong verb. Leave white space. A clean, scannable one-pager beats a cramped two-pager every time, because the recruiter never reaches page two.
The cut list
Most CVs are too long because they include things out of habit, not because those things help. Every line that does not sell you is a line stealing attention from one that does. Cut without mercy.
- Cut "References available on request." Everyone knows, and it wastes a line.
- Cut your photo, age, and marital status unless the employer specifically asks.
- Cut long paragraphs. Use short bullet points that start with a verb.
- Cut buzzwords like "hardworking" and "team player." Show them with examples instead.
- Cut anything you cannot speak about confidently for two minutes in an interview.
Tailor it, even a little
The same CV sent to every job is a generic CV, and generic loses. You do not need to rewrite it each time, but you should reorder it. Read the job advert, find the two or three skills they care about most, and make sure those appear near the top of your CV in the same words the advert used. Many employers screen with software that literally searches for those words. Speak the language of the advert and you survive the first filter.
Do these five things and you will already be ahead of most applicants, because most applicants do none of them. The goal is not a perfect CV. The goal is a CV that survives six seconds, earns a real read, and gets you the reply that starts the conversation.
Related
