How to write a CV that survives the first eight seconds

We read a great many CVs. The gap between a strong candidate and a strong CV is wider than most people realise — plenty of excellent people are screened out by documents that undersell them, and the fixes are mostly mechanical.

What happens in the first eight seconds

The reader checks three things, in this order: does the current or most recent job title look roughly right, is the career trajectory coherent, and are there obvious unexplained gaps. That is it. Everything else in your CV only matters if you survive that check — so the top third of page one has to carry it.

The structure that works

1. 1Name and contact details — one line, no address needed beyond the town
2. 2A four-line profile. Not a paragraph of adjectives: what you do, at what level, in what sector, and what you are looking for
3. 3Core skills — six to eight, in two columns, genuinely relevant to this application
4. 4Career history in reverse order, most recent role given the most space
5. 5Qualifications and professional registration

Write achievements, not duties

This is the single highest-impact change. A duty describes the job; an achievement describes you doing it well. Compare:

Aim for three to five achievement bullets on your most recent role, two or three on the one before, and a single line on anything older than about eight years.

What to cut

• The word 'passionate', and every other adjective you have not evidenced
• Photographs, date of birth, marital status and nationality — UK employers should not be considering these, and including them invites problems
• 'References available on request'. Everyone knows. It is wasting a line
• Hobbies, unless genuinely relevant or genuinely distinctive. 'Socialising with friends' actively costs you
• Anything beyond two pages. Three-page CVs get read less thoroughly, not more

Formatting for the systems that read it first

• Submit as a Word document or a text-based PDF — never a scan or an image
• Use standard headings: 'Career history', not 'My professional journey'
• Avoid text boxes, tables, headers and footers for anything essential — parsers frequently drop them
• Include the actual job title from the advert somewhere natural, because that is what gets matched
• Name the file properly: Firstname-Surname-CV.pdf, not cv-final-v3-USE-THIS.pdf

Legal essentials

• PQE stated plainly, with your admission date, and your SRA number if you are on the roll
• Practice areas with a rough split — '70% commercial property, 30% landlord and tenant' — rather than an undifferentiated list
• Caseload detail: typical volume, typical value, and how much you ran without supervision
• Billing history if you have it. Uncomfortable to write, and the thing partners look for first
• Case management systems named: Proclaim, LEAP, Visualfiles, iManage