Advice and guides / For candidates
How to write a CV that survives questions about itself
Your CV used to be read. Increasingly it is questioned. The lines you write are the lines you will be asked about, which changes how you should write them.
For years the advice was to write a CV that gets through a keyword filter. Stuff in the tool names, mirror the job description, use strong verbs. That advice still works on the filter, and it now fails at the next step, because the next step asks you about what you wrote.
Which lines get picked
Not the summary at the top, and not your education. The lines that get questioned are the specific claims in the middle: a named system, a named process, a number, a responsibility. "Handled month end close at a logistics firm" is a line that generates a question. "Detail oriented team player" is not, because there is nothing there to ask about.
That is worth knowing in both directions. Vague lines are safe from questions, and they are also worth nothing. Specific lines are what get you shortlisted, and they are what you will have to defend.
Write what you did, not what the team did
The most common failure is not lying. It is borrowing. People write the team's scope as their own because it feels small to write only their part. Then they are asked about a step they watched somebody else do, and the answer comes out thin.
Write your part precisely and it reads stronger, not weaker. "Prepared the vendor reconciliation the accountant signed off" beats "managed vendor accounts" in every conversation that follows.
Numbers you can defend
- Use a number only if you can say where it came from. "Reduced tickets by 30 percent" invites "over what period, measured how".
- A smaller number you can explain beats a bigger one you cannot.
- Ranges are fine. "Around forty invoices a day" is honest and answerable.
- If you never saw the number, describe the scope instead: a team of six, three clients, two regions.
Put the difficulty in
Most CVs read as though nothing ever went wrong. That is the one thing every experienced interviewer knows is false. A line that names a real constraint is unusual and it is memorable: "closed books on a four day timeline with two entities on different systems" tells a reader more than three bullet points of duties.
It also prepares you, because the standard follow up question is what most often went wrong, and you will already have thought about it.
If your CV already overstates something
Fix it before you apply again, not after you are asked. Soften the claim to what you actually did, keep the line, and lose nothing. A CV that says you supported a migration will get you interviewed. A CV that says you led one, when you did not, ends the conversation at the first question and follows you through the agency's records.
A quick test
Read your CV and stop at every specific claim. For each one, ask yourself: could I talk about this for ninety seconds, in order, including the part that was annoying? If yes, leave it. If no, either learn to, or rewrite the line to what you can defend.
If you want to see what those questions look like in practice, we publish the exact shape of our assessment, including the two questions that come from your own CV. When your CV is ready, you can put it in front of us.