How to Make Your CV: A Clean, Recruiter-Ready Draft

To make your CV, write one page with your contact details, a short summary, your work or study history, and your skills, then change a few lines for every job you apply to. The aim isn't a fancy design. It's a document a busy person can read in under a minute and a screening tool can read without choking. Everything below is about getting that done on a phone or a laptop with a free editor.

Start with the job ad, not the template

Open the job posting and copy it into a blank note. Underline the skills and duties it repeats. Those words are what the company cares about, and they're what any screening software will look for. If the ad says "inventory management" and your CV says "stock handling", a machine may not connect the two, and a human skimming may not either.

Now list your own work in plain lines: what you did, where, for how long, and what changed because of you. Don't write sentences yet. Just get the facts down. Freshers should treat college projects, internships, part-time work and volunteer work as real experience here. A sarkari job notification often spells out eligibility and experience in exact words, so read that closely too.

Put the CV together in this order

Use a single-column layout with standard headings. No tables, no text boxes, no photo, no coloured bars down the side. Those look fine on screen but often break when the file is parsed or printed in black and white.

1. Name and contact: phone, email, city, and a LinkedIn link if you have one. Use an email address that looks like your name.
2. Summary: two or three lines saying what you do and what you're looking for. Skip the old "seeking a challenging role" line; say the job title you want and your strongest proof.
3. Experience: most recent first. For each role, give the title, company, dates, and three to five bullets. Lead each bullet with a verb: handled, built, trained, reduced, closed.
4. Education: degree or school, institution, year. Freshers can put this above experience.
5. Skills: a short list of tools and abilities you can actually defend in an interview. Spell acronyms out once, like "Search Engine Optimization (SEO)".

Keep the whole thing to one page if you have under a few years of work, two pages at most otherwise. Cut old jobs that add nothing, and never invent a qualification or a date.

Make each bullet carry a result

A bullet that only names a duty tells the reader nothing they couldn't guess from your job title. Add what changed: how many, how much, how fast, how often. "Handled customer calls" becomes "Handled around 40 customer calls a day and resolved most complaints without escalation." If you don't have exact figures, use honest approximations and say so ("roughly", "about"). Never borrow a number you can't explain.

Use the same trick for soft skills. Instead of listing "teamwork", show a line where you trained two juniors or coordinated with another department. One concrete line beats five adjectives.

Check it before you send

• Read the ad again and confirm the main keywords appear somewhere in your CV, in your own sentences.
• Copy your CV into a plain text editor. If the text comes out jumbled, the layout is too complicated; simplify it.
• Save as PDF unless the application asks for Word. Name the file with your name, like Firstname_Lastname_CV.pdf.
• Check spelling and dates by reading aloud, then send it to one friend to read on their phone.
• Keep a copy of the exact version you sent for each job, so you know what you claimed when the call comes.

Do this once properly and every later application takes minutes, because you're only swapping the summary and a few bullets. If you'd rather have the drafting and the job applications handled together, Destava's AI career manager can build and fix your resume, tune your LinkedIn profile, and apply to matching jobs for you.