A recruiter working through a stack of graduate applications is not reading the way the applicant wrote. They are looking for three things — what you studied, what you have actually done, and whether you can be contacted — and they are looking for them in roughly that order. A CV that hides any of the three is doing the reader's job badly. And the reader has a stack.
The most common single reason a competent graduate does not get a call has nothing to do with the graduate: it is the template. Decorative two-column designs with a large photograph, a skills bar chart and a personal statement can reach the bottom of the first page before naming a degree. The information is present; it is not findable. What belongs in the top third is name, contact details, the degree and institution, and the single most relevant thing you have done — a project, an attachment, or a responsibility you genuinely held, described in terms of what you did rather than what the role was called.
Skills bars deserve their own mention, because they measure nothing. A bar showing “Excel: 80%” tells a reader nothing they can verify, and they know it. Eighty per cent of what? Against whom? A line saying you built the sheet that tracked something real, and what it was used for, tells them a great deal — and the CV gets shorter and stronger at the same time:
| Instead of | Write | Why it works |
|---|---|---|
| “Excel: ★★★★☆” | “Built the stock sheet used weekly by three staff” | Verifiable, and it shows scale |
| “Excellent communication skills” | “Ran the induction session for 40 new students” | A claim anyone can make becomes a thing you did |
| “Team player” | “Coordinated a four-person project to deadline” | Shows the role, not the adjective |
| “Hard-working and passionate” | Delete it | It is on every CV in the stack |
For a first job, one page is not a constraint to work around — it is the format the reader expects. Two pages filled with a thin record reads as padding rather than experience. The discipline is useful in itself: deciding what to cut forces you to decide what actually matters. And rewriting for every application is unsustainable — most people abandon it by the fourth — so tailor the top instead. Change the one-line summary and reorder the two most relevant items so they sit above the fold. That is ninety per cent of the benefit for ten per cent of the effort.
Remember that a CV is not an archive. Nobody is checking whether you listed every job, and a reverse-chronological list that opens with three months of unrelated retail work is burying the thing you want read. Lead with what is relevant to this application. Gaps are far less interesting to a recruiter than applicants believe; a weak first item is far more damaging than an unexplained six months.
There is also a quieter filter worth applying: everything on the CV is something you may be asked about in the first three minutes of a phone call. If you could not talk for a minute about a line, it is doing no work and should come out. It changes phrasing too — “assisted with the annual audit” invites a question you may not answer well, while “reconciled two accounts for the annual audit” invites one you can.
Finally, make the contact details boring. A professional email address, a phone number that is answered, a location. No photograph unless it is specifically asked for, and check that the number on the CV is the one currently in your hand — recruiters do not chase. Before sending, look at the first third of page one for five seconds and look away: if you cannot say what you studied and what you have done, neither can the person deciding whether to call you — and they are giving it less time than you just did.
