It isn't the design. It isn't the length. It isn't even typos, though those don't help. Across roughly fifty CV reviews this year, the single most common problem had nothing to do with formatting - it was that almost every CV described responsibilities instead of results.
"Managed a team of five." "Responsible for client communications." "Oversaw the migration to a new system." Every one of these is a fact about the job description, not about what the person actually accomplished in it. A recruiter reading fifty CVs a day can't tell the difference between someone who managed a team well and someone who managed a team badly - because the sentence doesn't say.
"Managed a team of five" becomes "managed a team of five through a product launch that shipped two weeks ahead of schedule." "Responsible for client communications" becomes "reduced client response time from 48 hours to same-day, across 30 active accounts." Same job. Same person. Completely different CV - because now there's evidence, not just a title.
Most people genuinely don't track their own results as they happen - there's no reason to, day to day. The result is that by the time a CV needs writing, the specifics have faded into vague summaries of the role. The fix isn't a better template. It's going back through actual projects and reconstructing the numbers: How many? How much faster? What was different at the end versus the start? Half the work of a strong CV happens before a single sentence gets written.
Not every role produces a clean number - plenty of valuable work doesn't reduce neatly to a metric. In those cases, the fix is still specificity, just not numerical: naming the actual decision made, the actual problem solved, the actual thing that existed afterward that didn't exist before. "Improved onboarding" is a duty. "Rebuilt onboarding after new hires were leaving within 90 days; nobody left in that window for the following year" is a result, with or without a percentage attached.
Want a CV that leads with results, not duties? See the CV & Career service.
