How To Write a CV That Gets Read (With a Template You Can Copy)

The first review of your CV is not really reading — it is scanning. A recruiter with sixty applications is looking for four things: are you roughly the right level, do you have the core requirement, are the dates coherent, and is anything obviously wrong. Everything below is about surviving that scan and then rewarding the proper read that follows.

The structure that works

1. Name and contact details. Name, phone number, professional email, city, and a link to your ACT Jobs or LinkedIn profile. No photo unless it is specifically requested, no date of birth, no marital status, no religion.
2. Professional summary. Three or four lines: who you are, how much experience, your strongest evidence, and what you are targeting.
3. Work experience. Reverse-chronological. Job title, employer, location, month and year range, then three to five achievement bullets.
4. Education. Qualification, institution, year. Graduates can put this above experience.
5. Skills. Concrete and checkable — software, systems, methods, languages with honest proficiency levels.
6. Certifications, projects or volunteering. Only where they support the target role.

Write achievements, not duties

This single change lifts more CVs than any formatting choice. A duty describes the job; an achievement describes you doing it well.

• Duty: "Responsible for social media accounts."
• Achievement: "Grew Instagram following from 4,000 to 19,000 in eleven months and cut cost per lead by 34%."

A usable formula: action verb + what you did + measurable result + timeframe. If you have no numbers, use scale, frequency or scope instead — team size, number of clients, volume processed, geography covered.

Make it survive an applicant tracking system

Many employers screen electronically before a person reads anything. To stay parseable:

• Submit a PDF unless another format is requested, and name the file Firstname-Lastname-CV.pdf.
• Use a single-column layout. Tables, text boxes, headers, footers and sidebars often come out scrambled.
• Use conventional section headings — "Work Experience", not "My Journey".
• Include the exact job title you are applying for somewhere in your summary.
• Write acronyms both ways on first use: "monitoring and evaluation (M&E)".
• Skip graphics, icons and skill rating bars — they carry no machine-readable information.

Length and formatting

One page for under three years of experience, two pages up to about fifteen years, three only for senior or academic profiles. Use one clean font at 10–12pt, generous white space and consistent date formatting. Consistency reads as competence.

Tailor without rewriting

Keep a master CV, then per application adjust only:

1. The professional summary, so it names the target role.
2. Three or four bullets, reordered or reworded to match the advert's priorities.
3. The skills list, so the required tools appear first.

Fifteen minutes of tailoring beats an hour of redesigning.

A template you can copy

ABEBE TESFAYE
Addis Ababa | +251 9XX XXX XXX | abebe.tesfaye@email.com | actjobs.et/candidate/abebe-tesfaye

PROFESSIONAL SUMMARY
Accountant with four years' experience in manufacturing and distribution.
Closed monthly accounts for a 120-staff company, reduced reconciliation
time by 40% through Peachtree process redesign. Seeking a senior
accountant role with reporting ownership.

WORK EXPERIENCE
Accountant | Habesha Distribution PLC | Addis Ababa | Mar 2022 - Present
- Prepared monthly financial statements for a company with ETB 180M annual turnover, closing within 5 working days.
- Redesigned the bank reconciliation process, cutting month-end close from 12 days to 7.
- Managed VAT and withholding tax filings with zero penalties across 30 consecutive months.
- Supervised and trained two junior accountants.

Junior Accountant | Zenith Trading PLC | Addis Ababa | Sep 2020 - Feb 2022
- Processed an average of 400 supplier invoices monthly with 99.6% accuracy.
- Built the payables ageing report now used in weekly management meetings.

EDUCATION
BA in Accounting and Finance | Addis Ababa University | 2020

SKILLS
Peachtree, QuickBooks, Advanced Excel (pivot tables, XLOOKUP), IFRS for SMEs,
Ethiopian tax compliance, Amharic (native), English (fluent)

CERTIFICATIONS
ACCA Applied Knowledge (in progress, 2 of 3 papers) | 2024

The mistakes that cost interviews

• Unexplained gaps. A one-line note — study, caring responsibility, relocation — closes the question.
• Generic openers such as "hardworking team player seeking a challenging opportunity".
• Listing every job since school. Summarise anything more than fifteen years old in one line.
• A dead phone number or an email you never check.
• Typos in your own job title. Read it aloud, then have someone else read it.

Write the master version once, properly. After that, every application is a fifteen-minute job.