I'm going to be honest about something: I spent four months applying to internships with a CV that I now realize was terrible. Like, embarrassingly bad. I'd built it on a Canva template during my first year of uni, and I kept adding stuff to it without ever asking whether any of it actually worked.
Forty-seven applications. Zero callbacks. Not one.
I told myself the market was tough. That I didn't have enough experience. That companies were ghosting everyone. And sure, maybe some of that was true. But the real problem was sitting right there in my Google Drive — a two-page, overstuffed, design-heavy CV that no recruiter was going to read past the first three lines.
The moment it clicked
A friend of mine — we're both in our third year of a business programme in Paris — casually mentioned she'd gotten her CV redone. Nothing dramatic, just a restructure. She'd applied to six places the following week and heard back from two within days.
I was skeptical. How much difference can formatting really make?
She showed me the before and after. The "before" looked a lot like mine: columns, icons, a skills bar chart (you know the ones — where you rate yourself 4/5 in Excel and 3/5 in "teamwork"), and a massive header with her photo and a quote about being passionate. The "after" was clean, single-column, no photo, no gimmicks. Just sharp writing and clear structure.
That's when I decided to redo mine. Not next week. That night.
What I actually changed
I gave myself two hours. Timer on. No distractions. Here's what I did.
First, I killed the template. I opened a blank Word doc. White page. One font (a clean sans-serif), two font sizes — one for headings, one for everything else. No columns. No icons. No colour blocks. It felt scary, stripping it all away. But that's the point: the words have to do the work now.
Then I rewrote every single bullet point. This took the longest. My old CV had things like "Responsible for managing the social media accounts of the student association." That's a task description, not an achievement. I rewrote it to: "Grew the BDE Instagram account from 280 to 1,400 followers in one semester through a weekly content series, increasing event attendance by 35%."
Same experience. Completely different impression.
I went through every role — my part-time retail job, my summer internship at a small agency, my volunteer work — and forced myself to answer one question for each: what actually changed because I was there? If I couldn't find an answer, I either dug deeper or cut it.
I trimmed it to one page. This was painful. I had to drop my high school awards, that two-week "internship" I did at 16 that was basically shadowing, and an entire section of hobbies. But a recruiter once told me something I haven't forgotten: they spend 7.4 seconds on an initial CV scan. Seven seconds. One focused page beats two scattered ones every time.
I wrote a real professional summary. Three lines at the top, below my contact info. Not a list of adjectives — no "dynamic, motivated, results-oriented." Just a clear statement: who I am, what I've done that's relevant, and what I'm looking for. Thirty words, maybe thirty-five. That's all the space you need when every word earns its place.
What happened next
I sent out eight applications between Tuesday and Thursday of that week. Same types of roles I'd been applying to for months — marketing assistant positions, mostly in Paris and Lyon.
By Friday, I had three emails sitting in my inbox. Three interview invitations. After four months of silence.
I honestly thought there was some kind of mistake. I reread the emails twice each. But no — these were real callbacks, from real companies, responding to applications that were fundamentally the same as before except for one thing: the CV.
One of the recruiters later told me she appreciated that my CV was "clean and easy to scan." That's it. Not that I had exceptional experience. Not that I went to the right school. She just said it was easy to read.
That comment stuck with me. We spend so much time trying to make our CVs impressive that we forget the first job of a CV isn't to impress — it's to get read.
What I'd tell you if you're where I was
Don't wait four months like I did. Don't convince yourself that the problem is the market or your lack of experience. Maybe it is, partially. But your CV is the one thing you can actually control right now, tonight, in a couple of hours.
Strip it back. Write about results, not responsibilities. Keep it to one page. Make every line pass the "so what?" test.
And if the thought of doing all that alone feels overwhelming, ask for help. I wish I'd done it sooner. My friend got professional help with hers, and it showed. There's no shame in having someone who reviews CVs every day tell you what recruiters actually want to see.
Two hours changed my entire job search. I don't think I got lucky. I think I just finally gave recruiters a reason to keep reading.