Start with the role you want
A CV is a focused account of relevant work, not an inventory of everything you have ever touched. Read the role description and identify the problems, responsibilities and skills that matter most.
Lead with a short summary that connects your experience to that work. Include your location or work preference if relevant, and use a professional contact address. Leave sensitive personal information out unless there is a specific, legitimate need for it.
Replace duties with evidence
“Worked on the backend” gives a reader little to evaluate. Explain what you built, the constraints you handled and your own contribution. Separate team achievements from your individual responsibility.
Use a measured result when you have one and can explain how it was measured. If you do not have a reliable metric, describe a concrete change instead. Accuracy is more useful than a dramatic claim you cannot defend.
Illustrative rewrite: “Built a Node.js job queue for report exports, added retries and failure alerts, and documented recovery steps for the support team.” This is more informative than “Responsible for backend development.”
Make your skills believable
Group skills into a few readable categories and highlight those you used recently. Avoid a wall of logos or percentage bars that do not explain what you can actually do.
If you list a technology, be ready to describe where you used it, what you owned and one trade-off you encountered. A tutorial and a production system can both teach you something, but they are not the same level of evidence.
Use projects to fill evidence gaps
For an early-career developer, a well-explained project can demonstrate practical reasoning. Describe the user problem, setup, tests and limitations. Include a working link only if you have checked it.
For experienced developers whose work is private, explain the architecture and decisions without exposing client data, credentials or proprietary code. An anonymised description is often enough to start a useful conversation.
Make the document easy to scan
Use clear headings, conventional dates and a simple layout. Test that text can be selected and copied from your exported PDF. Keep links readable and check the document on another device.
Before sending it, ask someone unfamiliar with your work to explain your main strengths after a quick read. If they cannot, shorten the introduction and move your strongest evidence closer to the top.
Your next steps
- Match the summary to the target role.
- Rewrite three duties as evidence of contribution.
- Remove skills you cannot discuss honestly.
- Check PDF text, dates and links.
References and further reading
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