A sales executive in Accra sent me his CV last month with a familiar note: "Patrick, I've sent this to fourteen companies and not one has called me back." I opened the file. It was three and a half pages, written in 2019, with two jobs added at the top since and nothing else changed. His most recent role — the best one he'd ever had — got two vague lines at the bottom of page one.
This is how most CVs get written. You open last year's version, paste in the new job, fix the dates, and send it out. It feels efficient. It is the single biggest reason qualified people get ignored.
A CV is not a record of your career. It is a tool you build, deliberately, to open a specific door. Below is the method I use to build one from scratch. Ten steps, in the order I do them. You can work through all ten in a weekend.
Step 1: Get your name and contact details right
Start with the easy part, but don't be careless with it. Your name goes at the top, large enough to read at a glance. Underneath it: your phone number, a professional email address, and your city. That's it. You do not need your full residential address, your date of birth, your marital status, or "References available on request." All of that is wasted space that Ghanaian CVs still carry out of habit.
On the email address: kwabena.mensah@gmail.com is fine. cool_guy_kobby@yahoo.com is not. If your email is the second kind, make a new one before you do anything else. A recruiter forms an impression in the first two seconds, and your email is in those two seconds.
If you have a LinkedIn profile that is actually filled out, add the link. If your LinkedIn is empty, leave it off — an empty profile does more harm than a missing one. And save the file sensibly: KMensah-CV.pdf, not final-cv-2-USE-THIS-ONE.docx.
Step 2: Build your CV around the job, not around your history
Here is the step almost everyone skips, and it's the one that matters most. Before you write a single line about yourself, find two or three real adverts for the kind of role you want. Read them slowly.
What you are looking for is the skills the employer keeps asking for. Notice which ones appear first — recruiters list their highest priorities at the top. If three different bank job postings all ask for "credit risk assessment," "client relationship management," and "regulatory reporting," those are not random words. They are the criteria your CV will be measured against.
Write down the five or six skills that appear most often across the adverts. That short list becomes the spine of your CV. Every section you write from here on should, somewhere, show evidence of those skills. You are not inventing a new you — you are choosing which true parts of yourself to put in front, based on what this employer is actually asking for.
Step 3: Lay out your job titles, dates, and employers
Now build the skeleton. List your roles in reverse order, most recent first. For each one: your job title, the organisation, and the dates (month and year — "2021–2023" is too vague for a recruiter trying to work out whether you have three years of experience or eighteen months).
If you were promoted within the same company, don't list it as two separate jobs that make you look like you job-hopped. Group it under one employer heading and show the progression. The same goes for a run of short consulting or contract roles — cluster them so the pattern reads as range, not instability.
Step 4: Tell the reader what each organisation actually is
A recruiter in Accra knows what Ecobank is. They may have no idea what "Greenfield Solutions Ltd" is — and if they can't picture the company, they can't judge the scale of what you did there.
So give each employer a one-line description: what the company does, roughly how big it is, and who it serves. "A 40-person fintech serving SMEs across three West African markets" tells the reader more than the company name alone ever could. If you don't know the exact figures, estimate and mark it — there's no shame in "~250 staff." The point is to let the reader picture the room you were working in.
Step 5: Describe the role before you describe the wins
Under each job, before the bullet points, write one or two plain sentences describing what the role was. This is the frame; the bullets are the highlights. If you're not sure how to phrase it, go back to the job adverts from Step 2 and see how employers describe that kind of role — then use that language honestly where it fits.
Keep this part general. Save the specific, impressive details for the bullets. The summary line is there so the reader understands the shape of the job before they see what you did with it.
Step 6: Write bullet points that prove something
This is where CVs are won or lost. Under each role, write two or three bullet points — and base each one on a skill from your Step 2 list.
The mistake to avoid is describing your duties. A duty is something anyone with your title was supposed to do. An achievement is what you actually did with it. There's a simple test: could someone who was bad at your job have written this same sentence? If yes, rewrite it.
Look at the difference:
Duty: "Responsible for managing client accounts and meeting sales targets."
Achievement: "Grew a portfolio of 60 SME clients, increasing the book's annual revenue by 28% over two years and retaining 95% of accounts through quarterly review meetings."
The first sentence could have been written by someone who missed every target. The second could only have been written by someone who hit them. You build trust with three things: brands, quantities, and specifics. Use real numbers — clients, percentages, cedis, team sizes, timeframes. If you think you don't have numbers, you almost always do; go back through your old reports, targets, and appraisals and pull them out.
Lead each bullet with a verb that shows you acted: led, built, grew, reduced, launched, trained, negotiated. Drop "responsible for," "assisted with," and "involved in" — they hand your contribution away.
Step 7: Add education and only the extras that earn their place
List your education the same way as your jobs: qualification, institution, year. For most professionals with a few years of experience, education belongs below your work history, not above it — your recent work is the stronger evidence now.
Then think hard about the extras. Volunteering, projects, certifications, and professional development can all strengthen a CV — but only when they speak to the job you're chasing. A project management certificate matters for a project role. Your church committee membership probably doesn't, unless it genuinely demonstrates a relevant skill. Your CV is not your life story. Every line that doesn't help your case is quietly working against the lines that do.
Step 8: Write the summary last, not first
The short paragraph at the top — your professional summary — should be the last thing you write, because you can't summarise a CV you haven't built yet. Now that the rest is done, you know exactly what it's selling.
Open with a plain label that tells the reader who you are: "Relationship banking professional with seven years in SME lending." Then add two or three lines pulling together your strongest, most relevant evidence and the skills from Step 2. Keep it specific. "Hardworking team player seeking a challenging role in a reputable organisation" is the sentence on ten thousand other CVs in the same inbox. Say something only you could say.
Step 9: Proofread, then beat the screening software
Read every line for mistakes. A single typo in a CV that claims you are "detail-oriented" undoes the claim. Read it out loud, or have someone else read it — your own eye skips errors it has seen too many times.
Then format it so the software can read it. Most medium and large employers run CVs through an applicant tracking system before a human ever sees them, and these systems choke on the things that make CVs look pretty: tables, text boxes, columns, sidebars, graphics, and logos. The handsome two-column template with the photo and the skill bars is often the reason your CV scores zero. For anything going to a big organisation, use a single column, standard headings (Experience, Education, Skills), normal fonts, and clear dates. Plain beats pretty when a machine is the first reader.
Step 10: Make it easy to send and easy to read on a phone
Export your CV as a PDF before you send it — a Word file can reformat itself on someone else's computer and arrive looking broken. The PDF looks the same everywhere.
One more thing worth doing in 2026: a lot of recruiters first open your CV on their phone. If you write it in Google Docs, you can share a clean, mobile-friendly link and keep one version that's always current — set the share setting to "anyone with the link can view," shorten it to something tidy, and you have a CV you can send by WhatsApp in seconds. Keep the PDF for formal applications and the link for quick introductions.
The point of all this
The sales executive from the start of this article rebuilt his CV with this method over a weekend. Three and a half pages became two. The job he'd buried at the bottom moved to the top and got six specific, numbered bullet points. He chose his sections around what the roles he wanted were actually asking for, instead of around the order things happened to him.
He had three interviews within a month. His experience hadn't changed — only the document had.
That's the whole idea. A CV isn't a transcript of your past; it's an argument for your future, built on purpose. If you'd rather have someone build that argument with you — pull out the achievements hiding inside your duties and put them in the language employers are screening for — that's exactly what we do at MasterCV.