A recruiter spends roughly six to eight seconds on the first pass of your CV, and a fair chunk of applications never reach a human being at all because an applicant tracking system filters them first. That double gate - software, then a tired person with forty other CVs open in tabs - is what your two pages have to survive. Most candidates write for neither. They write a list of duties, hope someone reads carefully, and then wonder why a role they were genuinely qualified for went quiet. The fix is not a flashy template. It is making the right information impossible to miss in the time you actually get.
What the six-second scan is hunting for
In that first glance, a recruiter is checking three things: does your most recent job title roughly match the role, do your years of experience fit, and is there a number anywhere that proves you did something rather than merely occupied a chair. Put your strongest evidence in the top third of page one. Bury your best achievement on page two and, realistically, nobody finds it.
Tailor to the advert every single time. Read the job description, note the four or five phrases it repeats - "stakeholder management", "P&L responsibility", "cross-functional" - and make sure those exact words appear in your CV where they are true of you. This works brilliantly, unless you stuff in keywords you cannot back up in interview, at which point it backfires the moment someone asks a follow-up question.
Achievements, not duties
"Responsible for managing the social media accounts" tells a reader nothing. "Grew the LinkedIn following from 2,000 to 11,000 in eighteen months, lifting inbound enquiries by around a third" tells them you produce results. Anchor every bullet to an outcome, and put a figure on it wherever you honestly can - revenue, percentage, headcount, time saved, budget held.
Here is a quick checklist of UK norms that still trip people up:
- Two pages maximum - one page is fine early in your career, and nobody senior is impressed by three.
- No photo, no date of birth, no marital status. These are American or European conventions and in the UK they invite unconscious bias claims, so leave them off.
- Reverse-chronological order, with dates as months and years.
- A plain, parseable layout - tables, text boxes and graphics confuse the screening software and can scramble your CV into gibberish before a human ever sees it.
The detail people forget
Send it as a PDF unless the advert specifically asks for a Word document, name the file with your actual name rather than "CV final v4", and read it aloud once before you submit. You will catch the tense slip on line nine that your eyes skate straight over on screen.