How to Write a CV in Ireland

Step 1. Gather before you write

Open a blank document that is not your CV and dump everything into it with no regard for wording. You are collecting raw material, and trying to phrase it nicely at this stage is what stalls people for a fortnight.

For every job you have held, note:

• Job title, employer, location, and the months and years you started and finished.
• What you were actually responsible for, in your own words.
• Anything that changed because you were there. Projects delivered, problems fixed, processes you built, people you trained.
• Any numbers you can lay hands on. Budgets, team sizes, volumes, percentages, timeframes.
• Tools and systems you used by name.

Then your qualifications with the years, any certifications, professional memberships, and languages with an honest level attached.

Step 2. Decide what you are aiming at

Before you write a line, pick the type of role you are going after and pull up three or four real adverts for it.

Read them side by side and mark what keeps coming up. The same handful of skills, the same tools, the same qualifications, often the same phrasing. That repetition is your brief. Those are the things the reader is scanning for and the words they will search the database with.

If you are actually going after two different types of role, write two CVs. Trying to serve both from one document produces something vague enough to fail at both.

Step 3. Build the skeleton

Now start the real document. The order below is what Irish employers expect, and it is also the order that automated screening reads most reliably.

1. Name and contact details. Phone, email, LinkedIn, town and county. No photo, no date of birth, no full street address.
2. Personal profile. Three or four lines. Leave it blank for now.
3. Key skills. Six to ten, taken from the language of those adverts.
4. Work experience. Most recent first, with title, employer, location and dates.
5. Education and qualifications. Most recent first.
6. Anything else that earns its place. Certifications, memberships, languages, relevant volunteering.
7. References available on request. One line.

Keep the whole thing in a single column with plain headings. Columns, text boxes and headers break the screening software, and a CV that parses badly can be invisible to the recruiter no matter how good the content is.

Step 4. Write the bullets, then the profile

Work experience first, profile last. The profile is a summary of the document, so writing it before the document exists is the reason it usually comes out as a collection of adjectives.

Three to six bullets per recent role, fewer as you go further back. Anything over ten years old can usually be one line with the title and dates.

Turn duties into results

This is the difference between a CV that gets read and one that gets skimmed. Listing what you were responsible for tells a reader nothing they could not already guess from your job title.

A pattern that works for most bullets: what you did, how, and what changed.

Start each bullet with a verb in the past tense. Led, built, cut, negotiated, delivered, rewrote, automated. Avoid "responsible for" and "duties included", which describe the job rather than you.

If you have no numbers

Plenty of good work is not measured. Use scale or comparison instead: how many people, how often, how large, compared to how it was before. "First person in the role to document the process, now used by the whole team of eleven" has no percentage in it and still says something concrete.

Now write the profile

Read back what you have written and answer three things in three or four lines: what you are professionally, what you are particularly good at, and what you are looking for next. Name the type of role. Keep it in plain language and avoid describing yourself as passionate, dynamic, or a team player.

Step 5. Cut it down

First drafts run long. Two pages is the target for most people, one page if you are a recent graduate.

• Cut anything that does not support the roles you picked in step 2.
• Compress jobs older than ten years to a single line each.
• Drop the Leaving Certificate once you have a degree and a few years of work.
• Delete any bullet that could appear on a colleague's CV word for word.
• Remove hobbies unless one is relevant or unusual enough to prompt a question.
• Take out "Curriculum Vitae" as a heading. Your name goes there.

Then read the whole thing aloud. It catches clumsy sentences and repeated words that your eye slides over. Have someone else read it too, because you cannot proofread your own writing properly. Set your document language to English (Ireland) so the spellchecker uses Irish conventions.

Step 6. Tailor it per application

You do not rewrite the CV for every job. You adjust three things, which takes about ten minutes.

1. The profile. Name the specific role and employer.
2. The key skills. Reorder so the ones this advert emphasises come first, and swap in any you have that it names.
3. The top two or three bullets of your most recent role. Lead with whatever is closest to what this employer is asking for.

Save each version with a sensible file name, for example Mary Kelly CV Quantity Surveyor.pdf, so you know what you sent where when the call comes.

Awkward situations, handled

A gap in your employment

Gaps are normal and Irish employers see them constantly. What causes a problem is an unexplained gap, because the reader fills it in with the worst option. One short line covering travel, caring responsibilities, study, illness or redundancy closes it completely. You do not owe anyone detail.

Changing career

Keep reverse chronological order, and use the profile to state the change directly rather than leaving the reader to work it out. In your bullets, lead with the parts of each job that transfer. A functional CV that hides your dates looks like you are hiding something, and it parses badly on top of that.

Little or no work experience

Put education first, then anything with real responsibility in it: part time work, college projects, placements, societies, volunteering, sports teams you organised. A summer in a busy restaurant demonstrates more about reliability under pressure than most graduates realise.

You were made redundant

Say so plainly if you mention it at all. Redundancy is a decision about the role. It is common enough now that it carries no stigma. "Role made redundant in a company-wide restructure" is a complete explanation.

You need permission to work in Ireland

If you already have a permission that lets you work, put one line near your contact details saying so, for example "Stamp 4, no sponsorship required". Employers screen for it early. If sponsorship is something you would need, keep it off the CV and bring it up once somebody has shown real interest.