The reverse-chronological CV

Reverse-chronological means the most recent job first, then the one before it, and so on back. It is the format almost every recruiter expects, the one every parser is built around, and the one that makes your career easiest to follow. The alternatives exist for real reasons, but they are chosen far more often than those reasons justify.

Three formats and what each is for

The reverse-chronological CV lists jobs newest first, each with employer, title, dates and bullets; it shows progression and makes the timeline explicit. The functional (or skills-based) CV groups achievements under skill headings — "Leadership", "Analysis" — and pushes the employment history, often without dates, to a short list at the end; it was designed for career changers and for people with gaps, to lead with capability rather than history. The hybrid (or combination) CV puts a substantial skills or achievements section at the top and a full reverse-chronological history below it. In practice recruiters treat the functional CV with suspicion, because they know what it is usually for, and it is hard to read: an achievement without a job attached cannot be weighed. The hybrid is a reasonable compromise for career changers. For everyone else, reverse-chronological is the default and the safe choice.

Why reverse-chronological parses best

Parsers are trained on the shape of a chronological entry: a line with a job title and an organisation, a line with a date range, a block of bullets, repeated. They identify positions by that pattern, attach dates to each, and from the dates compute years of experience and current employer — the fields recruiters search by. A functional CV breaks the pattern: bullets sit under a skill heading with no title, organisation or date nearby, so the parser cannot attribute them to a position, and the employment list at the end without dates yields no durations. The result is a candidate record with skills but no experience, which does not match a search for "five years in X". The app's experience section is built as chronological entries — title, employer, location, dates, bullets — and each layout renders them in the pattern parsers recognise.

Writing an experience entry

Each entry has a header and bullets. The header: job title, employer, location if it matters, date range in one consistent format. If the employer is not well known, one short line saying what the company does helps a reader place the role. Then three to six bullets for recent and relevant roles, fewer for older ones. Bullets are not a list of duties; they are a list of things that happened because you were there. Start each with a past-tense action verb (present tense for the current role, if you prefer, but be consistent within an entry), give the scope, and end with a result where one exists. Cut "responsible for", "duties included" and "helped with": they announce a duty rather than a result, and they push the actual content to the end of the line where a skim-reader never reaches it.

Action, scope, result

The pattern that makes a bullet useful is action plus scope plus result. "Managed social media" is an action with no scope and no result. "Managed four social media accounts for a retail brand with 60,000 followers" adds the scope. "Managed four social media accounts for a retail brand; grew combined following from 40,000 to 60,000 in a year" adds the result. Numbers are the fastest way to give scope and result — team size, budget, users, revenue, percentage change, time saved — and they are also the thing most CVs lack. Where you have no number, describe the result in words: "adopted as the team's standard process", "passed audit with no findings". Do not invent figures; a number you cannot explain at interview is worse than no number. Aim for one line per bullet, two at most, and put the strongest bullet first in each role, because that is the only one some readers will see.

Where education goes

For students and recent graduates, education comes first, above experience, because it is the most relevant thing about you: degree, institution, dates, and where useful the grade, a dissertation title or a few relevant modules. Once you have two or three years of relevant work, experience moves above education and the education entry shrinks to the essentials — degree, institution, year — without modules or grades unless the employer asks. Older or less relevant qualifications can be compressed to a line. Certifications go either in education or in their own section, with the awarding body and the year, and expired or superseded ones can simply be left off. In the app, education is its own section with dated entries, so trimming from the full graduate version to the one-line experienced version is a matter of deleting detail, not rewriting.