How to Write a Good CV

Maria Santos
Phone: 555 1234
Email: maria@email.com

School:
Big City Language School, 2020–2023. I studied English.

Job:
Coffee Shop, 2022–now. I make coffee. I help customers.

I can do:
- I speak Portuguese and English.
- I can use a computer.
- I can work in a team.

ANA MORENO
Phone: 555 9876 · Email: ana.moreno@email.com · Barcelona, Spain

SUMMARY
I am a friendly and hard-working student with eight months of work experience in customer service. I speak Spanish, Catalan, and good English. I want to work in hospitality or tourism.

WORK EXPERIENCE
Waitress — Café Luna, Barcelona (June 2023 – February 2024)
- Served customers in a busy café.
- Took orders in Spanish, Catalan, and English.
- Helped to train one new waiter.

Babysitter — Local family (2022 – 2023)
- Looked after two young children twice a week.

EDUCATION
Barcelona High School (2019 – 2023)
- Main subjects: English, Mathematics, Tourism.

SKILLS
- Languages: Spanish, Catalan, English (B1).
- Good with customers and teamwork.
- I can use Microsoft Word and Google Docs.

LUCAS FERREIRA
Phone: +351 912 345 678 · Email: lucas.ferreira.work@gmail.com · Lisbon, Portugal

PROFILE
Energetic customer service assistant with 18 months of experience in hospitality. I speak Portuguese, English, and basic Spanish, and I enjoy working with people from different countries. I am looking for a reception role in a hotel in Lisbon or Porto.

WORK EXPERIENCE

Receptionist (part-time) — Pousada da Praia, Lisbon
June 2023 – present
- Welcomed over 80 guests per week during peak season.
- Answered phone, email, and online bookings in three languages.
- Trained two new staff members on the hotel booking system.
- Resolved customer complaints quickly, with 95% positive feedback from guest surveys.

Waiter — Restaurante Mar Azul, Cascais
Summers 2022 and 2023
- Served up to 120 customers per shift in a busy tourist restaurant.
- Worked in a team of 8 waiters and supported new team members.
- Learned to take orders in Portuguese, English, and Spanish.

EDUCATION
Escola Secundária de Lisboa (2019–2023)
- Completed secondary education. Focus on languages and tourism.
- Final grade in English: 18/20.

SKILLS
- Languages: Portuguese (native), English (B2), Spanish (A2).
- Excellent customer service, learned in two busy hospitality roles.
- Hotel booking software (Booking.com extranet) and Microsoft Office.
- Calm under pressure and fast learner.

VOLUNTEER WORK
Local community centre (weekends, 2021–2022)
- Helped organise English classes for children from immigrant families.

Original bullet: 'Responsible for working with customers in a restaurant.'

Version 1 (general improvement):
'Served customers in a busy central London restaurant, managing up to 15 tables per shift and processing payments of up to £1,200 a night.'

What changed: I added numbers and a location. 'Managing' is a stronger verb than 'working with', and it gives a sense of scale — 15 tables is a genuinely demanding workload. This version would suit a general hospitality CV.

Version 2 (adapted for a customer service role):
'Resolved customer queries and complaints in a high-pressure restaurant environment, keeping a 4.8-star Google review average during my 12-month tenure.'

What changed: I shifted the focus from serving to 'resolving' — which is the verb the customer service job advert used. The review score is a concrete proxy for customer satisfaction. This version loses some of the operational detail of Version 1, but it gains relevance for a non-hospitality customer service role.

Version 3 (adapted for a team-leadership role):
'Trained and mentored four new servers during my final four months, reducing onboarding time from three weeks to ten days and increasing retention during the summer rush.'

What changed: I zoomed in on a specific leadership dimension of the job I might otherwise have buried. The duty here is training, not serving. This version sacrifices the customer-service focus of the first two, but it stakes a claim to a different kind of work entirely.

Reflection: The exercise showed me that one real job can support three different CVs, each aimed at a different employer. The 'truth' of my time at the restaurant is richer than any single bullet can capture — and choosing what to highlight is part of honest self-presentation, not its opposite. What I lose in each rewrite is breadth; what I gain is a sense that I am talking to one person, about one job, in a way that helps them.

What I could not put on my CV. The CV I sent last month is two pages of things that can be counted: dates, institutions, the number of students I taught, the percentage by which a metric improved, three languages at three different levels of fluency. It is, I think, a good CV by the standards of the genre. What it could not say — what the form literally will not accept — is the thing that in fact got me the job I currently have. Let me try.

Eighteen months before the interview, I made a particular decision in an office in a building in a city I was then living in, when I told a colleague that she was right and I had been wrong about a project I had been leading for a year. The project was redirected. She has since become my closest professional collaborator, the person who sent me the email I replied to last month, the person whose recommendation was the real reason I was being interviewed. None of this appears on the CV, which records the more visible fact: that eighteen months later, I was promoted. The CV is not lying. It is, in its way, scrupulously honest. But the thing it records — the promotion — is a consequence of a thing it cannot record, which is a small, uncomfortable conversation held in a beige room at five in the afternoon.

This is, I think, a minor instance of a much larger pattern. The CV knows about outputs — the paper produced, the campaign run, the students taught — and is blind to the things from which those outputs actually come. It has no column for the afternoon I spent on the phone with a difficult funder. It has no line for the trust that a certain editor extended to me in 2019 and has been quietly repaying ever since. It cannot mention the three years in my late twenties when I did, in worldly terms, more or less nothing — during which I did read, however, more carefully and more slowly than I ever have since, and during which I became, without quite noticing, the person to whom these recent 'achievements' became possible at all.

One response to this problem is to say that the CV simply has a narrow remit, and to expect more from it is unfair. This is true. Another response is to say that we have built a whole professional culture around a document with these specific blind spots, and that the shape of the document is now influencing the shape of the lives that produce it — that we are optimising for the things that fit in the columns, and quietly ignoring the things that don't.

I do not know which of those responses is correct. Probably both. What I do know, having just spent a Sunday afternoon on this essay, is that the honest answer to 'how did you get here' bears almost no resemblance to the document that was asked to answer it.

The dialect of the job advert. One writes many kinds of English, in the course of what is politely termed a career, and learns that the distinctions between them are neither trivial nor simply aesthetic. There is the English one writes in one's own voice, for people whom one hopes will like it; there is the English one writes at work, for colleagues who will forgive minor infelicities provided that the meaning survives them; and there is, nowadays, the distinctive English of the job advert and the CV that replies to it — a dialect at once specific and, in its way, strangely difficult to place.

I have been reading job adverts recently with something like the curiosity with which, in a calmer decade, I might have read regional dialects. A job advert for a role it would be impolite to name describes the successful candidate as 'an agile, results-oriented self-starter comfortable operating in ambiguity'. A second, for a different sort of job, asks for someone 'driven by curiosity and outcomes'. A third, with a kind of lazy sublimity, specifies 'a passion for excellence'. These phrases have the peculiar texture of advertising copy written by people who have been reading other advertising copy for a long time.

What the phrases share, I think, is a certain characteristic evasion. 'Comfortable operating in ambiguity' is the posture, not the content, of what is being asked for. 'Driven by curiosity and outcomes' specifies the direction of motion without, apparently, requiring any particular place to motion toward. 'A passion for excellence' is the phrase of someone who has given up describing what a good version of this job actually looks like, and is hoping that the candidate will supply, in their own imagination, the particulars. This is not incompetent writing; it is a distinct genre, with its own rules. The rules, I note with some professional envy, are easier to write to than plain description would be.

One can, of course, object. One should, in moderation. But I want to make a slightly different observation, which is that the dialect is a dialect of the reader as much as of the writer. These phrases have been repeated, by now, across several million adverts, and in consequence several million CVs have been written to meet them. The candidate who writes about being 'results-oriented' is not being dishonest; she is speaking, with complete lucidity, the language in which the role has been described. If we want candidates to write differently, we must write the adverts differently — a possibility, I note, which is almost never mentioned in the reams of advice offered to candidates.

There is, I realise, a mild absurdity in complaining about the clichés of corporate English in an essay that has already deployed 'peculiar texture', 'characteristic evasion', and 'reams of advice offered'. Every register has its own tells. The essayist's tells are not better than the recruiter's; they are just older. The argument is not that my dialect is more honest, but that the distance between the dialect and its object is, in the essayist's case, at least visible. That visibility is what allows us to notice things like the evasions of 'a passion for excellence' — and also to notice, uncomfortably, the evasions of our own.

I do not know how to end this essay except by returning to its small occasion. Someone, somewhere, is currently writing a CV in reply to an advert that asks for a results-oriented self-starter. I wish them well. I suspect the CV they are about to write is already, silently, shaping itself to the phrasing of the invitation — and that they will get the job, or not, in part because of how nimbly that shaping is done. Possibly none of this is corrupt. Possibly it is merely what communication, at this scale, among strangers, now is. Write the best document you can, the old advice goes. Send it. Forget it. I offer the same advice, reluctantly, here.