How to Optimise Your CV and Stand Out

With the tech job market being as competitive as ever, it’s important to do everything possible to maximise your chances of success, starting with your CV! Here are some tips on optimising yours and giving you the best possible chance of landing that dream job.

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First and foremost, it's important to recognise the purpose of your CV is to get you an interview. It should give an overview of your career, and highlight your key achievements and the impact you've had. It shouldn't include every minor detail and the best CVs strike this balance.

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So what should your CV look like?

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Structure

The general structure of a CV should be:

• Name, contact info, relevant links (personal site, GitHub etc)
• Personal summary/career highlights
• Work experience in reverse chronological order
• Notable side projects
• Education and any other details

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Personal Summary

This is the first thing someone will read, so it needs to be compelling, focused and unique to you. Include:

• A two-to-three-sentence summary of your experience.
• Up to three/four bullet points summarising your career highlights/most impactful project you’ve worked on. This is how ou can really start standing out!
  
  • You can (and should!) adapt these based on the role/company you’re applying to e.g. if you’re applying to a start-up, it’s worth showcasing your prior start-up experience.
• Any relevant info that isn’t obviously discernable (e.g. you’re looking to relocate to a new city/country, you’re looking to move from/into a management role etc)

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E.g.

Polyglot Engineer with 10 years of experience across Typescript, Javascript, Python and Go. Worked on greenfield projects and products with millions of users. Career highlights include:

• Founding Engineer at fintech startup x, built product from scratch and helped the company scale to y
• Improved load handling capabilities of the high-scale system by x
• Built x pet project outside of work
• Speaking at x, y, z conference/meetup
• Optimising x feature which increased conversion by Y

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Work experience

This is the meat of your CV and should take up the bulk of the space. You should include your entire work history, but dedicate the most space to roles in the past five years (these are what are going to land you interviews today!)

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What to include:

• Company name and dates of employment (include the specific month you started and finished, not just the year), job title
• A one-liner outlining what the company does, the rough size, funding (if relevant) and, particularly if it’s a big company, the focus of your team.

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E.g.

October 2023 - current - Few&Far - Senior Product Engineer

Few&Far is a 25-person, bootstrapped recruitment company focused on tech, product, design and data hiring. I was hired in a new team to build a platform jobseekers could use to find their next role.

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• Up to eight bullet points summarising your key achievements/responsibilities. They should focus on:
  
  
  
  • Impact, impact, impact. It shouldn’t just include what you’ve done, you need to explain the impact your work had. You can talk about this impact at a team and, if possible, business level. Including metrics helps validate this further, examples could be: increased scale, better conversion, improved performance, revenue etc
    
    
  • The biggest/most difficult tech challenges you worked on. This shouldn’t go into the granular detail of how but should summarise the complex problems you solved and explain the benefits the solution brought.
    
    
  • Any promotions or notable role changes

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• Tech used; the final bullet point should list the stack you worked with, in order of most exposure to least. This gives context on how recently you’ve worked with each piece of tech and is far better than a skills matrix!

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E.g.

• I worked as part of a six-person cross-functional team alongside two other full-stack engineers, a mobile developer, a designer and a product manager
• Responsible for building x, a job matching platform in x,y, z
• Spoke directly to customers to understand their pain points and designed a platform around it
• Based on customer feedback solely developed complex AI job recommendation algorithm, this increased applications by x%
• Identified issues x could cause long-term so worked across teams to introduce y into the product which brought x, y, z
• Used x for automated testing and increased test coverage from X->Y
• Built the platform ahead of schedule and product scaled from 0-x users 
• Promoted to Senior Engineer in Jan 2025
• Tech used:

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Follow this structure for roles over the past five years. You should still list prior roles, but best to just include the company name, job title, dates and a one-liner on who the company is and what you did.

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What else to include

• Education
• Side projects/GitHub link/personal site (ideally these should be at the top of your CV)
• Hobbies and interests
• Spoken languages

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Ideal CV Length

Part of the skill of writing a great CV is focusing it on the most relevant aspects of your career. Two pages is ideal and it shouldn’t be longer than three. Hiring managers/talent partners tends to be time-short, so keeping it concise accommodates that and also demonstrates a focused communication style.