Chapter 5: CV Writing and Personal Branding
Your CV is a marketing document, not a record
A CV is not a historical record of everything you have done. It is a document built to get you an interview for a specific role. That means tailoring it every time, leading with achievements rather than duties, and quantifying impact wherever you honestly can.
Replace descriptions of responsibility with descriptions of outcome. Instead of writing that you were responsible for a team, write what that team achieved under your leadership, and put a number against it wherever possible. Recruiters and hiring managers typically spend seconds, not minutes, on a first read, so the strongest material needs to sit in the top third of the first page.
Personal branding beyond the CV
Your personal brand is the consistent impression you leave across every document and platform a prospective employer might see, including your CV, your LinkedIn profile and how you present yourself in conversation. Consistency matters more than polish. A CV and a LinkedIn profile that tell two different stories about the same career will always cost you credibility.
What the research tells us
Estimates of how long a recruiter spends on an initial CV review vary between studies, and it is worth knowing the range rather than a single scary number. A widely cited early study put the figure at six to eight seconds. A more recent independent study, tracking real recruiter behaviour in 2023, found the average sat closer to seventeen to forty six seconds, considerably longer, though still short. What is consistent across the research is that around eighty per cent of CVs do not make it past the first screen, and that only around one in ten applicants is typically considered suitable for the role applied for.
None of this is meant to be discouraging. It is the reason tailoring matters as much as it does. A CV built to make its strongest points within the first few lines, in language that mirrors the specific role, is working with how CVs are actually read, not against it.
In practice: Rebecca's rewrite
Rebecca's original CV read: responsible for the customer service team. Rewritten with a coach, it became: led a team of twelve, reducing average response time by thirty one per cent and lifting customer satisfaction scores from seventy two to eighty nine per cent over eighteen months. Both sentences describe the same job. Only one gets shortlisted.
In practice: Daniel's two-page cut
Daniel, a senior IT project manager, had a CV that listed every project he had ever touched across a fifteen year career, running to five pages. Working through this chapter, he cut it to two pages, kept only the four most relevant and impressive projects for his target roles, and added specific delivery metrics, including budget managed and percentage delivered ahead of schedule. His interview rate more than doubled within three weeks of sending the revised version.
- Sending the same CV to every role, regardless of how different the job descriptions are.
- Listing duties and responsibilities without any measurable outcome attached.
- Allowing the CV to run well beyond two pages for anyone below the most senior executive level.
- Using a generic opening statement that could apply to any candidate in your field.
A note of supportIt is worth saying plainly: a CV that does not get shortlisted is very rarely a verdict on your worth or your career. Given how quickly the first screen happens, small formatting and tailoring choices carry a disproportionate amount of weight, often more than the underlying quality of the career itself. Treat each unsuccessful application as useful data for refining the document, not as evidence about you.
- Take one target job description and rewrite your top three CV bullet points to speak directly to it.
- Identify three achievements you can genuinely quantify with a number, a percentage or a timeframe.
- Remove any generic opening statement that could apply to anyone in your field.
- Check that your CV and your LinkedIn profile tell a consistent story before moving to the next chapter.
This programme gives you frameworks and actions. Your coach is where they become genuinely yours. Rather than arriving with answers, consider bringing these open questions into your next session and exploring them together:
- What did rewriting your achievements reveal about how you see your own value?
- What feels hardest to genuinely claim credit for on paper, and why?
- What does your current CV say about you that you are not sure is still true?