CV Claro

Build your CV from evidence, then choose the layout

A practical way to turn a vacancy and your real experience into a focused first draft.

Read the role as a set of questions

Before choosing a template, save the vacancy and separate its requirements into responsibilities, skills and practical conditions. Ask what the reader needs to establish: can you do the work, have you handled a comparable situation, and is your experience relevant to this level? This gives each section of the CV a clear purpose.

Make a small working list with a requirement on the left and your evidence on the right. Evidence might be a project, a recurring task, a qualification or an example of collaboration. Leave gaps visible. A gap is a drafting decision to consider, not an invitation to invent experience or repeat a phrase from the advert.

Describe your contribution precisely

For each relevant experience, write what you did, in what context, and what changed or was delivered. For example, describe organising a shared handover document and how the team used it. If you have reliable measurements, include the period and scope. If you do not, an observable deliverable is stronger than an invented percentage.

Keep the distinction between your work and the team result. “Contributed to” and “coordinated” describe different responsibilities; choose the one you can explain in an interview. Remove confidential customer names or internal figures where sharing them is inappropriate. You can still describe the kind of problem, your method and the scale of the task without exposing restricted details.

Select what earns space

Build a complete master record separately from the version you send. The master can contain all roles, courses and projects; the application version should make the relevant evidence easy to find. Put the strongest material near the beginning and give less space to older or unrelated detail. Keep dates and titles consistent between versions.

Finish with a relevance pass before a visual pass. Read every sentence and ask which requirement it supports. Then check whether a person unfamiliar with your employer would understand the wording. Expand an internal abbreviation or explain a specialist tool briefly when it matters. Only after the content works should you adjust typography, spacing and page breaks.

Prepare the information the editor needs

Collect your contact details, role titles, employer names, dates and qualification names before opening the template editor. Keep uncertain information in a separate note until you verify it. This reduces the temptation to fill an empty field with an approximate date or a more impressive title than the one you actually held.

For each application, keep a small note explaining why you selected the included examples. It will help you prepare for an interview and update the CV later. The document becomes easier to maintain when its content follows a clear argument rather than a layout you are reluctant to change.