CV Writing Advice:
Presenting the Best Version of Your Experience
LinkedIn, networking and personal recommendations all play an important role in modern recruitment, but your CV remains one of the documents most likely to shape whether a conversation becomes an interview.
For senior professionals in particular, the challenge isn’t usually a lack of experience.
It’s deciding what matters, what doesn’t and how to present twenty years of work without producing six pages of job descriptions.
At Parke Lane People, Andy has reviewed thousands of CVs during more than 20 years in recruitment.
The best ones aren’t necessarily the cleverest or most beautifully designed.
They’re the ones that make it easy to understand the person behind them.
Keep the structure simple
Keep the structure simple
Andy recommends beginning with a straightforward structure:
1. Name
Make it obvious.
You don’t need to write “Curriculum Vitae” across the top of the page.
2. Contact Details
Include the details somebody genuinely needs to contact you, typically:
- mobile number
- professional email address
- LinkedIn profile
There is normally no need to publish your full home address.
3. Profile
Keep this concise.
Your profile should tell the reader:
- who you are professionally
- the experience you bring
- your areas of strength
- the type of value you add
Avoid generic descriptions that could apply to anybody.
“Highly motivated results-driven professional” tells us very little.
Your actual experience does.
4. Skills & Systems
Make this useful rather than creating a wall of keywords.
Include systems, specialist skills, professional expertise and relevant technical knowledge.
A Finance candidate, for example, may want to highlight ERP systems, reporting tools, audit experience or professional qualifications.
A Marketing candidate may highlight CRM platforms, analytics, automation or channel expertise.
The principle is simple:
Help the person reading your CV quickly understand where your expertise lies.
5. Employment History
Start with your most recent role and work backwards. Always include dates.
For each position, give enough context to understand the organisation and your role, then concentrate on impact rather than responsibilities.
Instead of: “Responsible for managing the finance team.”
Think: “Led a team of eight across management accounts, payroll and transactional finance while introducing a revised month-end process that reduced reporting time.”
The second version tells us far more about what you actually achieved.
Where possible, include evidence:
- revenue growth
- cost reductions
- team size
- process improvements
- projects delivered
- budgets managed
- measurable commercial impact
Senior candidates sometimes struggle here because the things they do every day feel ordinary to them. They’re often not ordinary.
This is where talking your career through with somebody else can be valuable.
6. Education & Qualifications
Include relevant academic, professional and vocational qualifications.
For experienced candidates, this section usually doesn’t need to dominate the CV.
Your career achievements should do most of the talking.
7. Interests
You don’t need to manufacture impressive hobbies.
A short interests section can simply give somebody a glimpse of the person behind the professional experience.
If you genuinely play cricket, volunteer, run marathons, coach a team, paint, travel or spend your weekends restoring classic cars, say so.
Human beings recruit human beings.
Should You Use AI to Write Your CV?
Yes. And no. Tools such as ChatGPT can be genuinely useful when used well.
AI can help you:
- organise a large amount of career information
- improve sentence structure
- identify repetition
- proofread spelling and grammar
- tailor emphasis towards a particular role
- turn rough notes into a clearer first draft
But there is an important distinction between using AI to help write your CV and allowing AI to write your career for you.
The danger is that AI can make everybody sound the same. Suddenly everyone is:
“A strategic, results-driven leader with a proven track record of delivering transformational outcomes.”
Maybe you are. But so are thousands of other AI-generated CVs.
The strongest CV still sounds like the person who will eventually walk into the interview.
Never let AI invent your achievements
This is particularly important.
If AI suggests: “Delivered a 25% improvement in operational efficiency” and you didn’t, delete it. Your CV has to withstand questions in an interview. Every achievement, number and claim needs to be yours.
Use AI as an editor, not your biographer
A useful approach is to give AI the facts first.
For example:
“I led the implementation of a new reporting system across five branches. It reduced month-end reporting from ten working days to six. Help me express this clearly and professionally without exaggerating what I did.”
That’s very different from:
“Write me an impressive achievement for a Finance Director CV.”
One uses AI to improve your communication. The other asks it to invent your professional story.
The human element still matters
AI can improve words, but It can’t fully understand the context behind twenty years of your career.
- It doesn’t know which difficult decision taught you the most.
- It doesn’t know why one role mattered more than another.
- And it doesn’t know which achievement you’re dismissing as “just part of the job” when a hiring manager might see it as the most interesting thing on the page.
That’s where human conversation still matters.
Andy often helps candidates identify the parts of their experience that deserve more attention, challenge things that aren’t clear and think about what a prospective employer will actually want to understand.
The technology can help with the writing, but the judgement still needs to come from people.
Before You Send Your CV
Ask yourself:
- Does it clearly explain what I do?
- Have I shown achievements rather than simply responsibilities?
- Is the most relevant information easy to find?
- Have I quantified impact where possible?
- Does it sound like me?
- Could I confidently explain every statement at interview?
- Does it complement my LinkedIn profile?
- Have I removed unnecessary information?
Then ask somebody you trust to read it. Not to rewrite it.
Simply ask:
“Having read this, what do you think I’m good at?”
If their answer isn’t what you expected, your CV probably needs another edit.
CV writing is the start, not the destination
A strong CV won’t guarantee you a role, but it should do one important job.
Open the door to a conversation.
Once that happens, your experience, personality and judgement can take over.
Talk to Andy about your next career move
Let us help you start the conversation