A UK CV is two sides of A4, opens with a 3-4 line personal statement, lists your experience in reverse-chronological order, and leaves out your photo, date of birth and marital status. References are usually "available on request". It's called a CV, not a resume, and it uses British spelling: "organised", "programme".
Below is the exact layout, an example and what changes for graduates. If you already have a CV, check it free against a 14-point ATS checklist in about 30 seconds.
What is the standard UK CV format?
Use these sections, in this order:
1. Name and contact details
2. Personal statement (3-4 lines)
3. Work experience (most recent first)
4. Education
5. Skills
6. Certifications, languages or volunteering (optional)
7. References available on request (optional line)
Format rules:
- Two A4 pages maximum; one for graduates.
- One column and standard headings an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) recognises.
- Dates as Month YYYY: "March 2022 – Present".
- PDF or Word with selectable text, unless the job advert asks for a specific format.
- No photo, date of birth, age or marital status.
What goes in each section of a UK CV?
Contact details: name, phone, email, town or city, LinkedIn. No full address is needed. If you're not a UK citizen, add one line on your right to work:
James Okafor
Leeds | 07700 900123 | james.okafor@email.com | linkedin.com/in/jamesokafor
Right to work in the UK (settled status)
Personal statement: 3-4 lines. Who you are professionally, what role you're targeting and the strongest thing you bring, with a number if you have one. Rewrite it for each application using the advert's wording.
Work experience: job title, employer, location and dates, then 3-6 bullets that start with an action verb and show a result:
Marketing Executive — Brightwell Retail, Manchester
March 2022 – Present
• Grew email revenue 32% in 12 months by segmenting the customer list and testing subject lines.
• Managed a £40k annual paid-social budget across Meta and TikTok.
• Launched a loyalty programme that reached 15,000 members in its first year.
Education: degree, university, classification and year (for example, "BSc Economics, 2:1 — University of Bristol, 2019"). School leavers and recent graduates can add A-levels or GCSEs; experienced candidates can drop them.
Skills: a simple list of the tools and skills the advert asks for that you can back up.
How is a UK CV different from a US resume?
| UK CV | US resume | |
|---|---|---|
| Name | CV | Resume |
| Length | 2 A4 pages | 1 page (2 if senior) |
| Opening | Personal statement | Summary |
| References | "Available on request" or omitted | Omitted |
| Spelling | British ("organised", "programme") | US ("organized", "program") |
| Photo, date of birth | No | No |
See also whether to put a photo on a UK CV and the difference between a CV and a resume.
How should a graduate CV look in the UK?
One A4 page is enough. Put Education first, with your degree classification (or predicted grade), relevant modules, dissertation and achievements. Then work experience, including part-time jobs, internships and volunteering, written with the same action-and-result bullets as any other role: "Trained 4 new staff members" is experience, wherever it happened.
Why do UK CVs get filtered out?
In HAIRED's analysis of 10,000 CVs, 73% had at least one critical ATS error (see the study). The most common:
- 61% used tables, columns or graphics that scramble the text.
- 58% matched under 40% of the keywords for their target role.
- 44% used non-standard section headings.
Two-column CV templates are the riskiest: in our analysis, PDFs with columns or tables failed to parse in 52% of cases, against 4% for a plain single-column file.
How do you check that your UK CV is ready?
- Two A4 pages maximum, one column, standard headings.
- No photo or date of birth; a right-to-work line if relevant.
- A personal statement written for this job.
- Bullets with results, not duties.
- The advert's keywords, written the same way.
HAIRED's free CV checker scores your CV from 0 to 100 against a fixed 14-point checklist and shows the fix for every point. To rebuild it, the CV builder has single-column ATS templates; Job Match tailors it to each advert.
