The CV rewrite for men over 45

I read a CV last month from a man I'll call Tony. Sixty-three pages, including appendices. Fifty-three jobs listed. A summary paragraph that began, "Passionate about driving outcomes through strategic alignment of people and process." A skills matrix that included "Microsoft Word" and "email". He had been senior at a major Australian organisation for twenty years. He couldn't understand why nobody was returning his applications.

I want to walk through the rewrite, because Tony's CV is the rule rather than the exception. Most CVs from men over forty-five are terrible in the same predictable ways, and the fix is more about removal than addition.

Why most CVs at 45-plus are bad

Three failures, in order of severity.

The first failure is length. The CV has accumulated rather than been rewritten. Every job has been added on top of the previous one without anything being removed. By forty-five, the document is six or seven pages long, and the most interesting recent work is buried on page two underneath three pages of jobs from your twenties.

The second failure is description versus outcome. Each job lists what you did, in present-tense bullets. "Manage team of twelve. Oversee budget of $4m. Lead strategy." None of this tells the reader what changed because you were there. A bullet that says "Manage team of twelve" is indistinguishable from any other team-of-twelve manager. A bullet that says "Restructured a team of twelve, reducing time-to-delivery by forty per cent and lifting engagement scores from sixty-two to seventy-eight in eighteen months" tells the reader something about you specifically.

The third failure is voice. The CV is written in the corporate-speak of the era you grew into your career. "Strategic", "synergies", "driving", "passionate about", "outcome-focused". This vocabulary signals, accurately, that you came up through a particular kind of office in a particular era, and not in a way that flatters. The same content rewritten in plain English reads ten years younger.

The two-page rule

Two pages. Not three. Not "two-and-a-half if I shrink the margins". Two pages of standard A4, eleven-point readable font, sensible margins.

This is non-negotiable for anyone applying for a non-academic role at any level in Australia. Senior recruiters spend somewhere between thirty seconds and three minutes on your CV in their first pass. They are not reading page four. They are not reading page three. They are reading the top half of page one and skimming the rest.

If you've had a long career, the two-page rule feels impossible. It isn't. You achieve it through aggressive pruning, not through smaller fonts.

• Page one. Name and contact details (one line). Headline-summary (three to four lines). Most recent two roles, in detail.
• Page two. Earlier roles in compressed form. Education. One line of relevant credentials. That's it.

Anything that doesn't fit on two pages doesn't go on the CV. It either goes on LinkedIn (which can be longer), into the cover letter, or into the conversation. Treat the CV as a leave-behind, not a complete record.

ATS readability (the technical layer)

Modern Australian recruitment runs through applicant tracking systems. The CV gets parsed by software before a human ever sees it. If the software can't read your CV, the human never sees it.

Practical rules.

• No tables. ATS parsers handle tables badly. Use simple left-aligned text.
• No images, logos, or photos. They get stripped or break the parser.
• No headers or footers. Same reason.
• Standard section headings. "Experience", "Education", "Skills". Not "My Story" or "Where I've Been".
• PDF or Word. Both work. Avoid InDesign exports, designed CVs from Canva, or anything that started life in Photoshop.
• Standard fonts. Arial, Calibri, Helvetica, Garamond. Not anything ornamental.

I've watched senior men spend weeks on a beautifully designed CV that an ATS parses as three lines of garbled text. The parser doesn't care that it's beautiful. Save the design effort for the portfolio site, if you have one. The CV is plumbing.

The bullet structure (verb plus outcome plus metric)

Every bullet in the experience section follows the same shape.

Action verb. What you did. What changed. The number.

Examples.

• "Restructured a team of twelve across two states, reducing time-to-delivery from nine weeks to five and lifting engagement scores from sixty-two to seventy-eight over eighteen months."
• "Negotiated a three-year supply contract with a major Australian utility, saving $4.2m against budget and shortening payment terms from sixty to thirty days."
• "Led the migration of a $40m programme from on-premise to cloud, completing six months ahead of schedule and reducing operating costs by thirty-one per cent."

Compare those to the bullets they replace.

• "Responsible for team leadership and operational delivery."
• "Managed key supplier relationships."
• "Oversaw IT modernisation programme."

The first set tells the reader what changed because you were there. The second set tells the reader you held the role. There are tens of thousands of senior men in Australia who held these roles. The first set narrows the field to the people who actually moved the needle.

If you can't write the first kind of bullet for a particular job, that's diagnostic. Either the job didn't produce a measurable outcome (in which case it doesn't belong on a senior CV), or you don't remember the outcomes (in which case go and find them). Old performance reviews. Old project closure documents. Old emails to your manager. The numbers are recoverable if you look.

Aim for three to five bullets per role at the top of the CV, fewer for older roles. Quality matters more than quantity. One devastating bullet beats five generic ones.

What to leave off

The hardest part of the rewrite. What goes in the bin.

• Jobs from before about 2010. For most men over forty-five, anything from before your mid-thirties has stopped being relevant. Compress everything pre-2010 into a single line at the bottom of the experience section. "Earlier roles, 1998 to 2009: Various roles in [industry] across [companies]." Done.
• Irrelevant degrees. Your bachelor's is probably worth one line. Your honours thesis title from 1996 is not. Industry certifications more than ten years old are usually not worth listing. Memberships of professional bodies you no longer actively engage with, gone.
• "Passionate about" and its cousins. Cut every instance. "Passionate", "driven", "results-oriented", "outcome-focused", "strategic thinker", "team player". These are the words that say, "I have not updated my CV since 2008." The summary should describe what you do, for whom, with what specific record. Adjectives are noise.
• Hobbies and interests. Unless directly relevant to the role (rare), leave them off. The line "Hobbies: cycling, golf, family" tells a hiring manager nothing they want to know and signals an older-style CV.
• Photo and personal details. No photo. No date of birth. No marital status. No nationality unless work rights are genuinely in question. These are conventions from a different era and they hurt more than they help.
• References on request. Don't write "References available on request". It's assumed. Save the line.

The general rule. If a piece of information doesn't either help you get the role or differentiate you from the next senior candidate, it doesn't belong on a two-page CV. Be ruthless. The discomfort of cutting things you're proud of is the price of a CV that actually performs.

The headline-summary that does most of the work

The four lines under your name do more work than any other part of the CV. They are what gets read first, and often what determines whether the rest gets read at all.

Structure. One line of who you are professionally. One line of what you specifically do. One line of what you've recently delivered. One line of what you're looking for.

Example.

Senior operations leader with twenty-two years across financial services and telecommunications in Australia. Specialist in restructuring underperforming functions and migrating legacy systems to cloud. Most recently led a $40m cloud migration completed six months ahead of schedule with thirty-one per cent operating-cost reduction. Open to senior operations or transformation roles in regulated industries, Sydney or Melbourne.

Four lines. The reader knows who you are, what you do specifically, what you've done recently, and what role you want. Compare it to a typical opening summary, which often runs ten to fifteen lines and says nothing memorable.

Spend a disproportionate amount of your rewrite time on these four lines. Iterate them five or six times. Show them to a trusted friend in a senior role and ask, "If you read only this and nothing else, do you know what to do with me?" If the answer is no, rewrite.

The full process

Here is the order I'd recommend for the rewrite.

• Day one. Print the existing CV. Read it as if you were a stranger. Mark every bullet that doesn't have a measurable outcome.
• Day two. Cut everything older than fifteen years to a single line. Cut every "passionate about" and its cousins. Cut hobbies, photo, references-on-request line.
• Day three. Rewrite the bullets for your two most recent roles using the verb-outcome-metric structure. Find the actual numbers. Don't make them up.
• Day four. Write the four-line headline-summary. Iterate it five times.
• Day five. Layout. Two pages, simple structure, ATS-readable. Send to one trusted senior contact for a sense check.
• Day six. Implement their feedback. Final read.
• Day seven. Save as PDF and Word. Set aside.

A week of focused work. Done properly, the resulting CV is the document you'll use for the next two to three years with only minor updates.

A short imperative

CUT MORE. The instinct will be to keep, to add, to explain, to qualify. Resist it. Every line you cut from the CV makes the lines that remain land harder. The two-page senior CV is a sculpture, not a record.

Closing

Cut deep. Land hard. Two pages.