A CV that survives a thirty-second read

What actually happens to it

Your CV gets well under a minute on the first pass, often nearer twenty seconds. In that time someone is answering four questions: what is this person now, have they done anything close to this, is there a number anywhere, and can I see something they made.

Everything below follows from that.

The structure that works

1. Name, one line of positioning, and links. The positioning line is not a summary paragraph. It is eight words: Analyst: hospital operations data, SQL and Power BI. The links are your deployed project first, GitHub second, LinkedIn third.
2. Whichever is stronger: experience or selected work. If you have no relevant jobs, put projects first and call the section Selected work, not “Personal projects”: the second phrasing invites the reader to discount it.
3. Skills, grouped and honest. Three groups, not a wall of forty words.
4. Education last, unless it is your strongest asset.

One page under about eight years of experience. Two only if the second page earns itself.

Bullets: what, how, result, number

This is the whole craft, and it is a rewriting exercise.

Before: Responsible for data cleaning and analysis for the sales team.

After: Rebuilt the weekly sales report from three exported spreadsheets into one scheduled SQL job: cut preparation from four hours to fifteen minutes, and removed a double-counting bug that had inflated Q2 revenue by about eight per cent.

The second is not a better-written version of the first. It contains information the first does not: what the situation was, what you did, and what changed. Every bullet should survive the question so what happened?

If you have no numbers, use scale instead: how many people, how many rows, how often it runs, how long it took. Used by six dispatchers, weekly, since March is a number.

Applicant tracking systems, without the folklore

An enormous amount of nonsense is sold around this. The reality is dull. Tracking systems are text extractors that pull your document into fields. What actually breaks them:

• Text inside an image, including a header rendered as a graphic. There is nothing to extract.
• Multi-column layouts, where extraction interleaves the columns into unreadable order.
• A PDF exported from a design tool with no text layer.
• Section headings the parser does not recognise: “My Journey” instead of “Experience”.
• Sometimes tables, depending on the parser.

What does not break them: a normal PDF exported from a word processor, in one column, with standard headings.

So “ATS-optimised templates” sold for a fee are mostly charging you to avoid a problem you would not have had. Free path: Google Docs, LibreOffice Writer, or a plain LaTeX template. Paid: Canva Pro and subscription resume builders, and a Canva export can parse worse than a Word document, because of how the text layer is produced.

Keywords

Match the advert’s vocabulary where it is true of you. If the posting says “Power BI” and you use Power BI, write “Power BI”: not “BI tooling”, not “data visualisation platforms”. A human is scanning for the same word the requisition used, and so is the parser.

That is matching. Stuffing (listing tools you have not used, or a white-text keyword block) is checkable in about one interview question, and it ends the process.

With no experience at all

Lead with Selected work. Three projects, three lines each: what it does and for whom, the hard part, the number. That is the same structure as the case study page, compressed.

Include non-technical work that shows you can be relied on. Two years in a call centre is evidence of dealing with people under pressure and following process, and a hiring manager for an analyst role reads it as such. Do not hide it; frame it.

The one-line tailoring rule

Do not rewrite your CV for every application; you will stop applying. Change two things: the positioning line at the top, and the order of your bullets so the most relevant sits first. That is fifteen minutes, not two hours, and it captures most of the benefit.

The limitation worth knowing

A good CV changes your outcome at the margin: perhaps a few percentage points of response rate. The route changes it by an order of magnitude: a referred application is read by a human within a day, and a cold one joins several hundred others. Spend an evening making the CV good, then spend the rest of your evenings on the routes in the other lessons of this module. People polish CVs for months because it is the only part of the search that feels controllable.