Résumés and CVs Editing and Proofreading Services

A recruiter spends about seven seconds deciding whether to spend seven minutes. In those seconds their eyes land on the top third of page one and nowhere else. Almost every CV puts a personal profile there — five lines of adjectives about being a motivated team player — and spends its most valuable space saying nothing anybody can use.

We edit CVs and resumes for every kind of application — reverse-chronological and skills-based formats, career-change and returner CVs, one-page and two-page versions, versions tailored to a specific advertisement, CVs for systems that parse them before a human reads, and the shorter forms required by portals. Our editors work on the part of the page that decides whether the rest is read.

The top third of page one is where a CV succeeds or is set aside, and its failure is a profile paragraph occupying the only space that is guaranteed to be read. That space should contain facts, not self-description. We work through these so the first thing after the name is either the most relevant recent role or three or four lines of specific evidence, since a reader looking for a match wants to find it immediately and will not read to page two to do it; so any summary that survives is written as claims with numbers rather than qualities, because "extensive experience of budget management" is unverifiable and "managed £2.1m across four sites for six years" is a fact; so the most relevant role appears first even where it is not the most recent, with the ordering made obvious so it does not look like an error; so the layout puts the important content where the eye goes — left, high, and unindented — rather than distributing it evenly for balance; so dates are on the right in a consistent format, as a reader scanning for gaps should find them rather than hunt; so anything that would raise a question in the first seven seconds is answered on page one, including a career change or a current gap; so the document reads correctly as plain text for systems that strip formatting, with no tables, columns or text boxes hiding content; and so the second page exists only if it earns itself. CVs written this way get the seven minutes.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including employment history, salary information and material about current employers. We are editors rather than recruiters or careers advisers, and we offer no view on your prospects, any employer or any decision. What we can do is put something worth reading in the first seven seconds.