3 development CV tips you may have heard, but shouldn't act on

The more things change about working in global development, the more other aspects stay the same. For one, CVs should probably still be written by humans. “[A hiring manager] said to me once: ‘Why should I be bothered to read what someone else couldn't be bothered to write?’” Kathryn Harper, a professional development CV writer, said during a recent Devex Career event. While artificial intelligence is a fast-evolving tool that can help in some ways, “nobody can tell your story better than you can,” she added. During the session, Harper fielded questions on a range of topics related to how to optimize your development CV for the 2025 job hunt, from emerging trends such as AI’s role to queries that have been top of mind for generations, such as the ideal CV length. “No one ever sat down in front of “War and Peace,” and said, ‘I'm not going to read this. It's too long.’ I mean, things will get read, if they're well-written,” she said. For more of Harper’s takes on length and other common CV conundrums, here are three pieces of advice you may have come to believe are true — and why you might be mistaken. Myth: It should never be longer than one or two pages There are a lot of opinions floating around about how long a development CV should be, and that is probably because there isn’t one correct answer. However, there is one guiding principle that can apply to just about every development professional, no matter how much experience you have. “I think that your professional story needs to be as long as it needs to be to tell it in a compelling way, and that doesn't mean you shouldn't be concise,” Harper said. “My CV is three pages long, and I've been in the working world for 20-plus years. and so far, it hasn't stopped me from getting an interview,” she added. To keep your CV compelling, Harper said to make sure what you are including is clearly relevant to the position you are applying for and that older experience should generally take up less space compared to what you have accomplished more recently. “I think it's important to emphasize the more recent experience, and there are ways to edit down more dated experience, just even just to one line, title, organization, and tenure,” she suggested. “But I think going back more than 20 years, I don't think that content is [as] relevant.” Myth: Career breaks need to be masked Some may still be tempted to try and cover up employment gaps on a CV based on traditional wisdom that recruiters take this as a bad sign. “I think, if there’s one thing that came out of the pandemic, is [hiring authorities] are paying less attention to that,” Harper said regarding career breaks. Some may still advise adjusting your CV or LinkedIn profile in a way that covers up a career break, such as removing the dates. But if your goal is to avoid producing red flags, doing this may have the opposite effect. “I would not exclude dates of any kind. I think the exclusion, the omission of dates, comes across as ‘What is this guy trying to hide? Or, ‘What is this person not telling me?’” Harper said. Recruiters do want to see and understand the chronology of a candidate’s work history, and if that involves a period where work was not possible for personal reasons, it’s best to be honest, though you’re well within your right to abstain from going into great detail, Harper said. Myth: CV experience should read like a job description Devex readers may be familiar with the CV best practice of looking at your target role’s job description to guide your use of keywords. However, this should not be confused with detailing your work history in the same style and manner that you see in many job postings, which is to broadly describe a job’s function. “The job description conveys tasks and activities. The CV communicates impacts and outcomes,” Harper said of how to best make your case as a candidate. The way to get this across is to quantify your experience as much as possible. Harper provided several examples of how to go beyond language such as, “I worked in this area doing this type of work.” Instead, think about, “What was your population size? How many people did you make better? Or, how much funds did you raise?” she said. To put it another way, “baking brownies for 20 people in Chicago is not the same job as baking 20,000 brownies for people in Moscow,” Harper said. Ready to stand out from the crowd and get noticed by the recruiters who matter most? Update your Devex profile and start connecting with top global development recruiters now.