Your CV’s first page has one job: sell the interview

Assume the person who matters reads one page. Not because your career only deserves one page — because that’s the reality of how CVs get read: in seconds, under pressure, in a pile. Your first page has one job, and it isn’t to summarise your history. It’s to sell the interview.

Be future-focused, not history-focused

Most CVs are written facing backwards: everything I have done, in order. The reader is facing forwards: can this person do the job I need done next quarter? Build the page around the role you want, not the roles you’ve had. Every line earns its place by supporting the claim “I can do what you need next.”

Quantify whatever you honestly can

A number is the difference between a claim and evidence. “Responsible for sales growth” is wallpaper; “grew the territory 40% in 18 months” is a fact someone can lean on in a hiring meeting. Don’t invent numbers — an honest range or scale (“team of 12”, “$3M portfolio”) beats fiction every time, and it also beats vagueness.

Read every line and ask: so what? If the line doesn’t answer, it doesn’t stay on page one.

Make every line answer “so what”

The so-what test is brutal and it works. “Managed stakeholder relationships” — so what? “Kept a difficult three-way vendor relationship out of dispute through a contract renegotiation worth $2M” — ah. Same experience, different sentence, different outcome.

Let relevance beat length

The right length is whatever it takes to make the case — and not a line more. Two pages is usually plenty; the third page is almost always comfort, not case. Cut the early-career detail nobody will hire you on. Keep the through-line that leads to this role.

And stay ATS-safe

More than 80% of large employers run applications through ATS software before a human looks. Clean headings, standard section names, no tables-inside-tables, no text buried in graphics. A beautiful CV the software can’t parse is a rejection with good typography.

One last reframe: the CV is your foundation, not your strategy. It gets you taken seriously once you’re in a conversation — but the conversation is what gets you hired. Build the page once, properly, and then spend your hours where the roles actually change hands: with people.