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CV Tips from Our UX Meetup

This post is based on what we collectively discussed during our drop-in CV review session a few months ago at The Hoxton Hotel in Shoreditch, hope it helps!


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CV Tips

  • Start with a summary of your methods, tools, and skills at the top.

  • Use clear, understandable job titles that stand out without needing to read the full description.

  • Use ‘Left Align’, not ‘Justify’.

  • Adapt your degree or job titles to suit the role you're applying for (while staying truthful).

  • Say “3 years” instead of “2021–2024” to make timeframes easy to understand.

  • Only include months if the role lasted less than a year, e.g. “8 months”.

  • Write in short, concise bullet points that highlight your impact.

  • Use numbers to show quantitative impact, e.g. “Increased sign-ups by 30%”, or “80% of users completed the task successfully during usability testing”, or “70% of respondents had a satisfying experience when using the product”.

  • Be creative in demonstrating your impact. If you lack data, ask your team or estimate it yourself. For example, if you advocated for accessibility in a design project, industry research shows 1 in 5 users have accessibility needs → so you could estimate a 20% increase in engagement.

  • When you don’t have quant impact, rely on strong qual results such as strong business impact (e.g. helping stakeholders agree on objectives) or strong user sentiments

    (More tips here).

  • Relevant work experience should be at the top, this is most important.

  • Use a professional-looking gmail, outlook, or personal domain email address. Delete your hotmail with extreme prejudice.

  • Don't put an objective section or summary. It'll be skipped, and it's space that can be used better.

    • Note: Some recruiters disagree with this and say to have a short and punchy summary – example of good professional summary

  • Unless you have 20+ years' experience, make it 1 page. You can do it.

  • Don't put your full address. "City" is enough.

  • Name your resume "FirstName LastName CV" and that's it. Never submit it with "(Project Management)" or "Final" or "2018" or literally anything else in the file name.

  • If emailing your resume, always submit it as a PDF, never as a Word doc. You never know how wonky a Word doc will look on someone else's machine. If uploading to an online application that uses resume parsing software, you can upload the Word doc as well or if it's required to do so.

  • Try to read it in 10 seconds or less and see what you take away from it. That's about the initial screen time before someone makes an initial up/down decision, so you'll want to examine it from that perspective.

  • Interests are important because it gives the interviewer something to connect with you on, and it makes you more than just a faceless resume.


Portfolio and Interview Tips


Use STAR framework:

  • Situation: Briefly describe the context or background of the situation you faced.

  • Task: Explain what you were tasked with or what needed to be achieved in that situation.

  • Action: Detail the specific actions you took to address the situation or achieve the task.

  • Result: Share the outcome of your actions, highlighting the results and any lessons learned. (IMPACT, IMPACT & IMPACT is what hiring teams care about the most today)


Other Tips

We’d love to hear from you!

What’s your experience been like applying to UX roles?


If you’d like to join our next CV or portfolio review session, or share your experience to help shape better UX hiring practices, drop us a line: cvrepoapp@gmail.com


We’re building a UX community to support each other through the messiness of job applications in today’s market.



 
 
 

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