Graduate CV guide: structure, content and common mistakes

Last updated 26 August 2026 · Capply team

The structure recruiters expect

1. Header: name, phone, email, city, LinkedIn. No photo, no date of birth, no full address; UK recruiters neither need nor want them.
2. Profile (2 to 3 lines, optional): who you are, what you are applying for, and one concrete reason you fit. Cut it entirely rather than writing a generic one.
3. Education: degree, university, dates, grade or expected grade, plus a line of relevant modules or your dissertation if they fit the role. A-levels in one line.
4. Experience: jobs, internships, placements, in reverse chronological order. Part-time and casual work counts; what matters is what you demonstrate with it.
5. Projects, activities and positions of responsibility: often the strongest section for a student. Society roles, coursework projects, volunteering, competitions.
6. Skills: concrete and checkable (software, languages, technical methods). Delete "hard-working team player with excellent communication skills"; the experience section is where those are proved.

Writing bullets that carry weight

The pattern that works: action, task, result. Start with a verb, say what you actually did, and end with what changed because you did it, quantified whenever honesty allows.

• Weak: "Responsible for social media."
• Strong: "Ran the society's Instagram for a year, growing followers from 300 to 900 and filling all 40 places at our flagship event."

Numbers do not need to be impressive to be effective; they need to be real. "Served 60+ customers per shift while training two new starters" tells a recruiter more than any adjective. Never inflate: graduate schemes check, and interviews probe CV claims directly.

The mistakes that get graduate CVs skipped

• Two pages of thin content instead of one page of strong content.
• Duties instead of achievements: listing what the job involved rather than what you did with it.
• One CV for every application: untailored CVs read as untailored. Reorder bullets and adjust emphasis for each role; it takes minutes, not hours.
• Decorative formatting: columns, graphics, skill bars and unusual fonts make CVs harder to skim and can parse badly in the application systems employers use to store them. Clean single-column layouts with standard headings are safer and look more professional anyway.
• Typos: the fastest way to undermine a claim of attention to detail. Proofread, then have someone else proofread.
• Burying the good material: if your best evidence is at the bottom of page one, most skims never reach it.

Improving a CV quickly

The fastest route is a specific critique followed by a rewrite: identify which bullets are duties rather than achievements, which claims lack evidence, and what the target role rewards that your CV currently hides, then rebuild it around that. This is exactly what Capply's AI CV checker does: it reviews your CV against graduate recruitment standards, gives specific line-level feedback, and then rewrites the whole document into a polished version in seconds, which you can edit and export. Capply never stores your CV; it is processed for the feedback and rewrite, then discarded.