UK CV Format: What to Include and What to Leave Off

A UK CV has a settled shape. Deviating from it rarely helps, and several of the deviations people import from US or European templates actively hurt — some because recruiters read them as inexperience, others because employers are obliged to ignore them.

The sections a UK CV needs

In the order they normally appear:

Name and contact details. Name, phone, email, city, and a LinkedIn URL if it is current. That is all.
Personal statement or profile. Two to four lines. Who you are professionally, and what you are looking for. Rewrite it for each advert.
Employment history. Reverse chronological. Job title, employer, dates, then bullets covering what you did and what changed as a result.
Education. Reverse chronological. Institution, qualification, dates. Graduates should put this above employment; everyone else below.
Skills. Relevant, specific, and ideally evidenced elsewhere in the document.

The National Careers Service sets out essentially this structure in its guide to CV sections, and it is what UK recruiters expect to find.

Optional, if genuinely relevant: professional memberships, certifications, publications, languages, volunteering. Each earns its place only if it speaks to the advert.

What to leave off, and why

This is where imported templates cause the most damage. The following should not appear on a UK CV:

Leave off	Why
Photograph	Invites appearance-based bias; many employers discard CVs carrying one
Date of birth or age	Age is a protected characteristic
Marital status, children	Protected characteristics; irrelevant to competence
Nationality	Only state right to work if the advert requires it
Full home address	A city is sufficient; the full address is a data-protection liability
Gender	Protected characteristic
"References available on request"	Assumed by default; wastes a line

The legal backdrop is the Equality Act 2010, which defines the protected characteristics an employer must not make hiring decisions on — age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage and civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion or belief, sex, and sexual orientation. Acas explains what a compliant recruitment process looks like in its job applications and hiring guidance.

Note what this means for you as a candidate: employers do not want this information on file, because holding it makes a discrimination claim harder to defend. Including it does not make you look forthcoming. It makes you look like you did not know.

This is also where the Europass CV template misleads UK applicants — it includes a photograph field, because a photo remains conventional in parts of continental Europe. It is not conventional in the UK, Ireland, or Australia.

Two pages, not one

The US one-page convention does not apply here. Two pages is normal and expected for anyone past their first couple of roles, and compressing fifteen years onto one page reads as thin rather than disciplined.

Graduates and early career: one page is fine, two if you have substantial placements or projects.
Mid-career onward: two pages. This is the default.
Academic CV: length is not a constraint — publications and grants are the point.

If you are over two pages, the fix is cutting old roles down to a single line each, not shrinking the font to nine point. A CV nobody can read comfortably is worse than one that omits a job from 2011.

Formatting that survives parsing

Most medium and large UK employers and virtually all recruitment agencies screen applications through software before a person reads them. The formatting rules that follow from that are unglamorous but absolute:

Single column. Two-column layouts scramble in many parsers — the sidebar text gets interleaved with the main column.
Standard headings. "Work Experience", not "Where I've Made An Impact". Parsers look for the conventional labels.
No text boxes, no tables for anything that matters. Content inside them is frequently dropped entirely.
No graphics carrying information. Skill-rating bar charts convey nothing to a parser and little to a recruiter.
Real text, not an image. A CV exported as a picture is invisible to screening software.
PDF, unless the advert specifically asks for Word.

You can see how a parser reads your file with a free ATS check, or start from a single-column template that is built not to break.

British spelling

Write in British English and keep it consistent — organise, specialised, analyse, programme, centre. Beyond looking native to the market, it matters for keyword matching: screening software compares text literally, so the American form of a term the advert uses in British spelling may not register as a match.

Dates and gaps

Use month and year (March 2022 — present). Year-only ranges look like you are hiding something even when you are not.

Employment gaps do not need apologising for, and UK employers are used to them — but leaving them unexplained invites the reader to guess. A single line is enough: Career break — caring responsibilities, or Sabbatical — travel and study. State it plainly and move on.

A note on tailoring

None of the above is a substitute for matching the CV to the advert in front of you. A perfectly formatted, legally clean, two-page CV that does not mirror the essential criteria will still lose to a scrappier one that does.

Get the format right once — it is a fixed cost. Then tailor the content per advert, which is the part that has to happen every time.

Sources: National Careers Service — CV sections, Equality Act 2010, Acas — job applications and hiring, Europass CV.