A recruiter with fifteen applications does not read fifteen CVs. They skim fifteen and read three. The first filter takes less than a minute and almost never turns on your layout.

The top of the page decides

The first five lines carry everything the sort is made on: your role, your years of experience, your main stack, your city, your availability. If one is missing, the reader has to hunt for it — and they will not.

Everything below exists to confirm what those five lines announce.

Experience that says what you did

The most common mistake is not spelling, it is the copied job description:

Web developer — Took part in developing the company's applications, teamwork, met deadlines.

That could describe anyone. Replace the role with the result:

Web developer — Took over a Laravel stock management app (11,000 lines, no tests). Added accounting export, split it into modules, cut home page load time by four.

Three things make an experience credible: what you found when you arrived, what you did, what changed. Even without a spectacular number, the story holds.

Side projects count, if they run

When professional experience is short, side projects carry the weight. Two conditions for them to count:

  • the project is reachable — a working link, a repository someone can open;
  • you can say why you built it, not just what you built it with.

A clone of a well-known app, with no link and no reason, adds nothing. A small tool that solves a real problem, however ugly, opens a conversation.

What can go

Many CVs keep sections out of habit. You can drop these without losing anything:

  • the photo, unless the role explicitly asks for one;
  • marital status, family situation, driving licence;
  • office software, unless it is the job itself;
  • "Hobbies: reading, music, sport", which separates no one.

The space you win goes to experience and projects.

Languages, with a level you can hold

In Madagascar the English question almost always comes up. Write the level you could sustain in an interview: reading technical documentation is not the same as following a daily meeting with a foreign client. Both have value, but they lead to different jobs.

One CV per family of roles, not per advert

Rewriting your CV for every posting is exhausting and rarely pays. Prepare two or three versions per family — back-end, front-end, mobile — and adjust only the title and the order of your experience.

The AsatekUP CV editor keeps your versions and handles the layout; you only touch the content.

The proofread that changes everything

Have your CV read by someone outside your field. Ask them to tell you, without looking again, what you can do. If their answer does not sound like what you meant, the problem is not theirs.