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CV layout that survives contact with a real employer

6 minute read · Updated 2026-09-01

Most CV advice about layout is really advice about taste. This is not. A UK employer scanning a shortlist looks at a CV for somewhere between six and thirty seconds before deciding whether to read it properly, and layout decides what they see in that window.

The order that works

  1. Name and contact details, one line each, at the top. No heading saying "Curriculum Vitae": they know what it is.
  2. A personal statement of three or four lines, written for this job rather than in general.
  3. Key skills, licences and tickets, as a short list. This is where a CSCS card, a Class 1 licence, an SIA badge, an NMC pin or a forklift certificate belongs, not on page two.
  4. Work history, most recent first, with dates, employer, job title, and three or four bullets of what you actually did.
  5. Education and training, briefest of all unless you left school recently.
  6. References available on request, or nothing at all. Never the referees' contact details, which is their data, not yours to publish.

The mechanics

  • Two pages. One if you have under five years of experience. Three only for academic, medical or senior technical roles where a publication or project list is expected.
  • A plain font at 10 to 12 point. Arial, Calibri, Helvetica, Georgia. Nothing decorative, nothing condensed.
  • Margins of at least 1.5cm and real white space between sections. A dense CV reads as hard work.
  • Bold for headings and job titles only. If everything is bold, nothing is.
  • Bullets, not paragraphs, in the work history. Three to five per role, each starting with a verb.
  • Consistent dates. "Mar 2023 to present" throughout, not a mixture of formats. Gaps get noticed; inconsistency gets noticed faster.

The two column question

Two column templates look smart and cause two problems. Recruitment software often reads them in the wrong order, turning your CV into nonsense, and the sidebar usually holds the skills the employer most needs to see, in the narrowest part of the page. Use a single column. If you want visual interest, a horizontal rule under each heading is enough.

Skills rated out of five stars, progress bars and word clouds are worse than useless. Nobody believes a bar chart that says your Excel is 80 per cent, and the space would have carried a sentence proving it.

PDF or Word

Send a PDF unless the employer or the application form asks for Word. A PDF looks the same on every machine and cannot be edited by accident. Name the file properly: Jane Smith CV Class 1 Driver.pdf, not cv final v3 (2).pdf. The file name is the first thing in the employer's folder, and it is a free chance to say who you are.

One caveat: a small number of older applicant tracking systems still read Word more reliably than PDF. If a job advert asks for .doc or .docx, that is a real instruction, not a preference.

What the software sees

If your CV goes through a parser, it looks for headings it recognises, dates in a pattern, and a job title near an employer name. Keep the headings ordinary: "Work experience", "Education", "Skills". Avoid text inside images, headers and footers, or text boxes: several parsers ignore all three, which means the qualification you put in the footer does not exist as far as that employer is concerned.

Our fuller guide to that is CV format for applicant tracking systems.

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