How to write a UK CV that gets past screening

The UK market has converged on a format that looks casual to American eyes and rigid to European ones: two sides of A4, a personal statement at the top, and a straightforward reverse-chronological history underneath.

The shape of a UK CV

• Name and contact details, including a UK phone number if you are applying locally.
• Personal statement: three to four lines stating who you are professionally, your most relevant experience, and what you are looking for.
• Key skills or a skills profile — particularly useful for technical and public-sector applications.
• Professional experience, reverse chronological, with achievement-led bullets.
• Education and qualifications, including grades where they are strong and relevant.
• Additional information: languages, right to work, driving licence if the role needs it.
• References available on request — one line, no referee details needed at application stage.

No photo, no date of birth

UK employers removed photos and personal details for equality-of-opportunity reasons, and most large employers now run anonymised shortlisting: name, age, school and gender are stripped before the hiring manager sees the application. A photo does not help and marks you as unfamiliar with the market. Date of birth, marital status and nationality belong nowhere on the CV. If the employer needs right-to-work confirmation, they will ask, usually in the application form.

The person specification is the real job description

Public-sector and many large-employer roles in the UK publish a person specification listing essential and desirable criteria. Shortlisting is frequently scored against those criteria, sometimes by a panel with a matrix. If the criteria say "experience of managing budgets of £1m+" then a bullet that says "managed a £1.4m departmental budget across two financial years" is not a nice-to-have. It is the point.

The same principle applies in the private sector with less ceremony: mirror the language of the advert where it is genuinely true of your experience, and make the evidence easy to find.

Spelling, tone and the small things

• British spelling throughout: organisation, prioritise, programme, licence (noun), centre.
• Understatement reads as confidence. "Led a team of six through a system migration with no customer downtime" lands better than "spearheaded a transformative world-class initiative".
• Two pages is standard. One page is acceptable early in your career; three is rare outside academia.
• A4 paper, and a font size of 10–11pt with generous margins — UK reviewers expect a document that prints cleanly.
• Check the employer’s name, the role title, and the hiring manager’s spelling. These three mistakes are the most common instant rejections.

Graduate schemes and early careers

For graduate schemes, the CV is often secondary to online tests and application-form questions, but it is still screened. Lead with your degree and your most relevant project work, include a "Skills" block that names the tools you have genuinely used, and give part-time or voluntary work the same treatment as an internship — it is evidence of reliability and context, which is what graduate recruiters are trying to assess.