Your CV

Many CVs go through recruitment software that parses or indexes them. Others go straight to a person. A clear CV works for both. This shelf is about putting what a reader looks for where they will find it, and keeping off the page what does not belong there.

We write from the recruitment desk, the side that reads CVs for a living, and from building recruitment software. That is the only qualification we claim. We do not know what a hiring manager at a company we have never dealt with wants to see, and there is no single official South African CV format, whatever a template promises. What we can describe is what commonly happens on the agency side. That covers what a consultant tends to look at first and what gives them a reason to open the file properly. It also covers why a file with confusing dates is sometimes set aside in high-volume recruitment, without anyone phoning to ask.

Start with how to write a CV for a South African job. It is the long one. It covers the parts that are South African rather than generic: NQF levels, the registrations employers screen on, own transport where the job needs it, and why a two-column layout can come out scrambled in some parsers.

Then read what to leave off your CV, which is shorter. It covers the lines that waste space or hand out other people's numbers, how to check who is asking before you send documents, and what POPIA lets you ask for once a copy of your CV is sitting in a database you have forgotten about.

This blog sits on a job portal, and the CV article describes our own parser because it is the one we can describe accurately. The layout points apply wherever you send the file, including to our competitors.