Be Confident in Your CV – and in Interviews

Becky Stock January 2026

Are you wholly confident in your CV? Does it accurately reflect you? Your achievements? Your skills? The following goes into detail on how you can be sure of and wholly happy with your CV – without the use of either AI or a professional CV writer.

Becky is a qualified CV writer (yes that’s a ‘thing’!) and her ‘thing’ is to help all manner of people transform their CVs as well as their confidence and morale via an in-depth consultation and complete CV rewrite – bringing out all those very best bits of you that employers will love. She has written this to help you achieve similar results by following some simple steps.

Having a great CV isn’t just about getting your foot in the door – though with hundreds of applicants per role being the norm, that part is of course the initial aim. It’s also about being able to confidently talk through what you’ve written with the interviewer, who often will refer to key points you’ve written.

A few questions:

-Are you proud of your CV?

-Does it go into detail on key achievements?

-Are those achievements quantified – do they have figures attached?

-Can you expand confidently about the action/achievement you mention?

-Do you feel confident that you can impress an interviewer by showcasing your commitment to your career and the level of detail you are capable of demonstrating?

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What Becky provides is the platform upon which clients can detail all roles leading up-to where they are now – their career choices, earlier roles (some key activities and ‘pull-outs’), where and how they added value, spending extended time on more recent roles (trying to attach great figures if possible) – and spending some time exploring both innate traits and cultivated skills.

This serves as fantastic interview practice (alongside careers counselling/clarity building and morale raising as relevant) – in a far less pressurised environment.

What you can do is something similar:

Ensure beforehand to have identified one to three key roles or role types you have your eye on.

1. Think carefully about the questions Becky, another CV consultant or an interviewer may ask, based on your CV. For details on the STAR format, see below.

   
   

-For those that don’t know, STAR is Situation, Task, Action, Result.

2.  Depending on your unique career, think about one to 10 key achievements in this way: what was the context, what did you do (using which skills perhaps) and what was the result? Make sure these are relevant to the roles/role types you are going for – ideally in different ways.

N.B. On the CV, there’s not much room for all these so Becky misses out the ‘task’ bit – but for the sake of an interview, or a covering letter, you could think about/detail all 4 aspects of STAR.

3. Write the answers down, thinking hard about figures. For example, if you introduced a new process, try and do some calculations.

   
   

4. From 10 years in interviewing people, Becky knows that, once keenly prompted, you may be able to calculate an approximate percentage of time that the new process saves a team or person (in a week or month) far more easily than you had thought.

There are many diverse ways in which people add value (and can attach key figures to) for example: Monetary (profit, revenue or account worth/growth), customer increases, team sizes managed, NPS, employee engagement/retention increases, productivity increases, audit/compliance scores, industry awards, press coverage, student results and incident reductions.

With earlier roles, no need for figures (though they’re great if you have them) but even just acknowledging a key pullout (way you added value) is confidence and clarity building.

4. Now, if you can, find someone you can go into the STAR format with… let them be your reflective ear, hearing how you achieved X, Y and Z! If you don’t find anyone, use yourself – a recording perhaps to verbalise what we’ve outlined previously.

This is where it gets even more useful!

• Remember recruiters spend under 10 seconds on initial CV scans - they have hundreds of CVs to look through.

• Try and make your CV no more than 2 pages.

• Aim for 5 (6 absolute maximum) lines in the top profile. Allude to the value you’ve been proven in delivering and the level at which you’ve been working in the first sentence. Then go into all those invaluable skills and traits they want – focusing on the more high-level range and ensuring the people / leadership skills are covered.

• Cut all unnecessary words.

• Make earlier roles less detailed.

• Mostly focus on where you’ve added value or high-level activities on the CV.

• Begin lines with action verbs (delivered, executed, led, managed, spearheaded, etc).

• Do a little intro before bullets - outlining the company if little known, setting context and summarising accountabilities, scope and scale of the role.

• Avoid beginning bullets with ‘Responsible for…’

• Make bullets no more than 2 lines – they are supposed to be easy to scan. You can always do a sub-bullet if necessary.

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Bingo – you should now have much more CV and interview confidence.

We hope you enjoyed this article. If you want an increased level of CV and interview confidence; higher clarity and/or morale; and/or an expertly written CV, LinkedIn or cover letter, you can find Becky on 07928 525882 – or at becky@winningcvs.com. She can tailor a service to your needs. You could also explore www.winningcvs.com and if you mention this article, you will get 20% off the site prices!