Charlotte is a Career Expert at RealtimeCV and a Certified Professional Résumé Writer (CPRW). Before moving into resume writing full-time, she spent over a decade in HR and talent acquisition for banks and consulting firms in London, screening thousands of CVs and sitting on interview panels for graduate schemes right through to senior-hire rounds. She has seen, close up, exactly how quickly a hiring manager decides whether a CV is worth a second look, and how often a genuinely strong candidate gets passed over because their document buries the one thing that actually matters.
That experience is the reason she is fussy about specifics. She specialises in reframing finance and consulting careers around the achievements that hiring managers in those sectors actually look for, things like deal experience, client outcomes, and revenue impact, rather than a list of duties copied from a job description. If a client tells her they "managed a portfolio," her first question is always how big the portfolio was, what happened to it under their watch, and whether that can be turned into a number. She has a low tolerance for vague phrases like "results driven" and will usually cut them on sight.
Charlotte also spends a lot of time on structure. Banking and consulting CVs tend to get scanned in seconds by someone who already knows the shape they expect to see, so she is careful about where the strongest line sits on the page and how much white space surrounds it. She will often rewrite a client's opening summary three or four times before she is happy, because in her experience that is the paragraph that decides whether the rest of the document gets read at all.
Her clients have gone on to land roles at Big Four firms, boutique consultancies, and tier-one banks, and a good number of them come back to her a few years later when they are ready for the next move up. Outside of work she still reads the Financial Times most mornings out of habit, a leftover from her recruitment days that she has never quite managed to shake.