There are thousands of articles online that talk about the best approaches to writing a CV (curriculum vitae). Which is the best one?

You can take all the advice that you find online and offline from your peers, friends, and mentors. But if you want to write a CV that fully embodies all the personal and professional milestones of your life in a nutshell, then you need to follow a set of rules.

A basic set of rules that governs CV, epitaph, and memoir writing and helps you move ahead in life.

We believe that following these rules will help you show a clear picture of yourself to your readers, who are your potential employers, and land that dream job in your industry. This 3-rule set has helped individuals around the world create great profiles of themselves.

Honesty Is the Best Policy

One of the biggest risks that professionals and graduates take while writing a CV today is that they exaggerate. Although the tendency to write papers, including things that are not inherently true or factual, is a natural human trait, it is best to avoid mentioning invalid or fabricated facts in your CV.

Hyperbole is one factor that should nowhere be found in your writing because it projects a negative image of you to your employer.

The ideal approach to writing a CV is by listing down your work experience and educational qualifications reverse-chronologically along with your skills, interests, and hobbies, and personal information. That’s all basically what a potential employer wants to read about you.

The urge to exaggerate comes when you are writing about your skills, experience, and education. So, while writing these, it is important that you embrace honesty.

You can use a little hyperbole when writing about your professional achievements because no one is going to cross-check those. Most employers will take your word for it, which is not really the case when it comes to the aforementioned points.

Objective Reading and Editing

Even if a little extravagance slips into your writing, this phase should help you clear it out and refine your CV. Once you have completely listed down your achievements, skills, etc., it is time to go through every single information once more.

But this time, you have to read it with an objective view. Imagine that you are reading the CV of another person – someone whose life is already known to you. Read the copy carefully and simultaneously make corrections if necessary.

Reading your own CV objectively helps you in the editing process. You are not influenced by your own feelings and are not particularly thinking about getting hired. You are just going through your life history – and that is how a perfect CV is born.

Check the Presentation

This is the phase where you edit like a cut-master. Your CV should not be more than 2 pages in length – whether it is a digital copy or an A4 printed one. Use a font that is universally and professionally accepted (unlike Comic Sans) and format the copy using a word processor like Microsoft Word.



If you feel that you need some external writing help while you are editing, you can always seek assistance and ask some of your friends to help and take a fresh glance.

Conclude with a Statement

The time when the opening statement was the most important part of a resume is gone now. Today, the statement of the object is nearly out of fashion. But, that doesn’t mean that you should conclude your CV abruptly.

Just summarize your skills and qualifications and write 2-3 sentences about your professional life. Writing more than that will make it a paragraph, and HP managers are always running out of time.

You can also choose to customize your CV as per the job you are applying for. The closing statement can be tweaked according to the job description. Except for showing an effort from your side to the employer, it also makes his/her job easier while shortlisting candidates.

The key to summarizing your life in the form of a CV is to embrace honesty without a dash of an exaggeration, reading and editing it objectively, and concluding it with a convincing closing statement.

We believe that the best person to write about your own life is no one else but you. You just need the inspiration and the guidance to start and you will have the perfect CV in your hands.

These three rules should get you going as you decide to move to the next phase of your professional life. We wish you all the best!

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