Your CV is not a record of your professional life — it is an advertisement with one goal: getting you an interview. Whoever screens applications goes through dozens of CVs in a single sitting and gives each one only a glance before deciding: keep reading or move to the next. This guide explains how to write a CV that survives that first glance and convinces the reviewer — human or applicant tracking system — that you deserve the interview. The first-glance rule In that first glance, the reviewer looks for only three things: what you are good at, where you proved it, and whether that matches the advertised role. Your strongest material must therefore appear in the top third of the first page: a clear professional title, a short summary, and the key technologies you command. Do not bury your best cards on page two — nobody may get there. The structure that works For developers in our region, the most effective order is: contact details (professional email, LinkedIn, GitHub, city), then a two-to-three-line professional summary, then grouped technical skills, then work experience in reverse chronological order, then projects, and finally education and certificates. Fresh graduates should move projects and education above experience — they are their strongest material. Stick to one page if you have under five years of experience, and two pages maximum no matter how long your career. The professional summary: two lines that decide The summary is not a list of adjectives ("hardworking, passionate, works under pressure") but a focused answer to one question: who are you professionally? A good example: "Backend developer with three years of experience building APIs with Node.js and PostgreSQL for e-commerce companies, looking for a role to deepen my distributed-systems expertise." Specific, targeted, and it saves the reviewer the work of guessing. Experience: achievements, not duties The weakest thing you can write under a job is a duty description: "responsible for developing front-end interfaces." The reviewer knows what a developer does — what they want to know is what you specifically accomplished. Start every line with an achievement verb: "built", "improved", "reduced", "shipped" — and tie it to a tangible outcome: "rebuilt the checkout page, noticeably reducing cart abandonment." On numbers: use them when you genuinely have them, and use honest ranges when you are not precise ("cut response time to less than half"). Never invent shiny percentages — the first interview will expose them, and lost credibility is not recoverable. Technical skills: organized and honest Group your skills into clear categories: languages, frameworks, databases, tools and infrastructure. And remove any technology you cannot discuss confidently in an interview — a cloud of thirty technologies inspires suspicion, not admiration, and one awkward question about a skill you used as decoration can sink the whole interview. Projects and GitHub: your parallel CV In modern tech hiring, an active GitHub account is part of your CV whether you link it or not — many reviewers will look for it. Pick two or three projects you are proud of and give each a line in the CV: what it does, with which technologies, and the hardest problem you solved in it. Make sure every repository has a clear README — it is the first thing that gets opened. Getting past applicant tracking systems (ATS) Many companies — especially Gulf and international ones — run CVs through automated screening before any human eye. The rules are simple: use a clean text-based layout with no complex tables, overlapping columns or images; export as a text-based PDF (not a scanned image); and include keywords from the job post itself wherever they genuinely apply to you — the system matches terminology literally. Arabic or English? The practical rule in our market: keep your primary tech CV in English, since it is the screening language at most technology companies, including local ones. Prepare an Arabic version if you target government entities or companies that require it. In both versions, keep technical terms in English as they are commonly used — literal translations confuse the reader and do you no favors. Tailor for each role — in minutes You do not need to rewrite your CV for every role — just adjust three spots: the professional summary to reflect the target role, the order of skills so that the technologies in the post come first, and the top two lines of your latest experience to feature your most relevant achievements. Ten minutes of tailoring raises your odds more than any cosmetic polish. Mistakes that get you rejected instantly The most common offenders in the CVs we see: an unprofessional email address; a photo and competence-irrelevant fields (marital status, date of birth) on CVs aimed at modern companies; typos in the first two lines; unexplained time gaps; and a file named "CV-final-v2-new.pdf". Name the file after yourself and the role, proofread twice, and explain any gap with one honest line. Before sending, run a final checklist: one to two pages, your strongest material in the top third, achievements rather than duties, working links, ATS-friendly formatting, and tailoring for the role — then ask a colleague whose judgment you trust for a last look, since a second eye catches what yours has grown used to. And remember that a CV opens the door but does not pass the interview for you. On modern hiring platforms like Talents-OS, objective evidence completes your CV: auto-graded technical tests and GitHub activity analysis prove what you claim — making your profile convincing before anyone reads a single line of it.