How to write a CV for a South African job

If you're applying via a job portal or an ATS (applicant tracking system), your CV is going to be parsed before a recruiter even gets to it. Sometimes they'll just read it straight away. A clear CV works in either scenario.

We're writing from the agency end of the desk and from building recruitment software. This is the order a consultant would typically go through, what might make them stop, and what the software does before they even start. It is not a template. There is no official South African CV format, and a template just tends to make your CV look like every other CV.

What happens in the first minute?

When you apply via a job portal or to an agency that uses an ATS, the software will typically read your file before any human does. It extracts the text from your file and creates a profile of you: your name, contact details, job titles, employers, dates, skills and education. In many agency processes the consultant works from that profile and only opens the actual file if something in it looks interesting.

You've heard the claim that systems reject most CVs before a human sees them. Ours doesn't, and we haven't found that claim in any study. What costs an application at this stage is silence: the software gets the file wrong, the profile comes out wrong, and the consultant's search doesn't return you at all.

Put your last three years where they will be seen

Use reverse chronological order: newest role at the top, oldest at the bottom.

A quick scan goes straight to your most recent job title and the dates next to it, then your location, your qualifications and the skills the job requires. The question is whether you are doing the work being advertised and whether the dates make sense.

A personal summary at the top is optional. If you have one, keep it to four lines at most that nobody else could claim as theirs: what you do, in what industry, at what scale, and what you're looking for next.

Contact details, four lines and no more

Your name. Your cellphone number. An email address you actually check. Your town and province.

That's the entire block. Your street address isn't required, and what to leave off your CV covers the rest of what doesn't belong.

What happens to those four lines once you've uploaded them is a perfectly fair question, and ours is answered in the privacy notice. Ask the same question of anyone else you send your CV to.

Give a cellphone number that will answer, with voicemail, and check your WhatsApp and your email. A consultant who can't get through to you goes to the next candidate. If your email address is still the one you made up in grade 10, make a new one with your name in it.

Work history is dates first, then what you did

Put the month and year at both ends. "Sales consultant 2019 to 2022" is not a date range, that's a shrug. "Sales consultant Mar 2019 to Aug 2022" tells the reader you were there for three and a half years, which is a very different proposition from fourteen months.

Then the employer, then your title. If the company name doesn't say what the company does, add six words that do: "industrial fasteners, Isando, forty resellers" gives your market, your product and your scale in one line, and a consultant a reason to open the file.

Gaps

Put the gap on the page in one line. Retrenched during the 2020 shutdown. Studying full time. Caring for a parent. Recovering from an accident.

There's no such thing as a gap that automatically disqualifies you. Just be honest about it and keep your dates straight. If the reader can't see the gap, an honest explanation is indistinguishable from a dishonest one, and a consultant with a shortlist due that afternoon may move on to the next file rather than phone to ask.

Duty lines that say something

"Responsible for a variety of administrative duties" is a very common line on a South African CV. It's useless to the reader, because it could describe anyone.

Tell us exactly what you did and how much: the number of invoices per month, the number of outlets or sites, which system, by name. Were you the only person doing it, or one of six? Did anyone report to you?

"Processed roughly 300 creditor invoices a month in Sage, sole clerk for four branches" does more work than a paragraph of verbs.

Skills, without the wall of words

A block of 60 comma-separated words will get you found in a keyword search. It costs you credibility when the consultant opens the file, though, because it reads as someone hoping rather than someone telling you what they did.

Name your systems: Pastel, Sage, SAP, Syspro, Xero, SARS eFiling. Then say what you did in them. "Excel" is useless. "Excel: pivot tables and VLOOKUP, monthly stock reconciliation" is the sort of thing you'd be asked about in an interview.

Education and NQF levels

A lot of South African adverts state the NQF level they're looking for, so do the same with your qualifications.

Matric is the National Senior Certificate, level 4 on the National Qualifications Framework (Department of Education policy). Above that you have a higher certificate (level 5), a diploma (level 6) and a degree (level 7), with the full NQF comprising ten levels (SAQA).

If you didn't finish, state what you did finish and when. "Grade 11 completed 2018" is a fact a consultant can work with. A qualification listed with no year and no institution is one they have to ask about, and that takes a call.

Then add what South African employers routinely check for and candidates routinely leave out: your SACE or SANC registration number, your PSIRA grade, where you are with your SAICA articles, your driver's licence code, and whether you have your own transport if the role needs it. The licence and transport are frequently missing when the advert specifically asks for them.

How long should a CV be?

There is no South African rule on length, so this is practical advice. Your years of experience dictate it, unless the advert specifies a maximum, in which case you abide by that.

Two or three years of work easily fits on two pages. Ten years might take three or four. Twenty-five years in one discipline, where the projects are the essence, can take longer, as long as the last ten years are at the front.

The two-page rule is a convention from the days when you printed your CV and put it in a folder.

The file itself

Send a PDF, unless the advert specifically asks for a Word document. A PDF looks exactly the same on the consultant's screen as it does on yours. Name the file after yourself with CV appended, something like JohnSmithCV.pdf, because it's likely to end up in a folder full of files called cv.pdf on the agency side.

Some CV parsers are less accurate with complex tables, graphics or more than one column. They don't all handle these the same way, so each of the four below is a risk rather than a certainty.

Two columns. Text extraction takes the words in the order the file has them, which is not necessarily the order your eye reads them. A two-column layout can leave your job titles interspersed through your skills list, so a layout that looks perfectly neat on paper can end up the one that's all muddled.

Tables and text boxes, for the same reason. A CV in a table can break the link between a date and the role it relates to.

Contact details in the header or footer of the Word document. Some extractors simply ignore that section, so your number is on the page but not in the profile, and the call won't come.

A CV that is all one big image, usually a photo of a printed page. On this site a second route reads the first few pages as images, so it can work here. It won't work everywhere. If you still have the file you originally wrote the CV in, send that one.

Keep the file small. The site accepts files up to 10 MB, and a CV made of text comes nowhere near that.

To see what the software makes of your file, upload it once and look at the profile it builds back to you. A wrong job title or date shows up there, and you can correct it.

One disclosure while we are here. This site is a job portal, and it has just asked you to put your CV on it. Every layout point above applies wherever you send your CV, our competitors included.

What should you change for each application?

You don't need a rewrite. Change the title line under your name to match the job you're applying for, where that is honest. Change the top two or three lines of your most recent role so the parts that match the advert come first. Change the summary, if you keep one.

First look at three or four live adverts for your type of work and note the words they use: the same job can be a debtors clerk in Bellville and an accounts receivable administrator in Sandton.

See what administrator adverts are asking for→

Then answer the screening questions on the application correctly, and read them through properly. On a number of job portals a single wrong answer to a knockout question can see your application go belly up before anyone opens the carefully edited file you've just produced. The rest of the journey is in what actually happens to your CV inside an agency.

Before you send it

• Open the PDF on your phone. If it looks odd there, it's going to look odd to a consultant who opens it on their phone.
• Make sure every date has both a month and a year.
• Check the cellphone number digit by digit, out loud.
• Make sure the file name has your name in it.
• Read your most recent role and ask whether a stranger could tell what you actually did all day.
• Make sure there are no bank details and no referee's cellphone number on it.
• Send it to yourself first, and open it from the email, not from your desktop.

None of this in itself will get you a job. It gets you read, and that's the bit you've got control over.