What a UK, Irish or New Zealand CV is expected to look like
The conventions are settled, and a tailoring tool built for the American market gets several of them wrong by default. Letter paper, US spelling and a one-page rule are the usual giveaways, and a recruiter in Leeds or Auckland spots all three before reading a word of your experience.
| Convention | What readers expect | What JobShifu does |
|---|---|---|
| Length | Two sides of A4 for most experienced candidates. One is fine early on. Three is for senior, academic or clinical roles. | Recommends a limit from your seniority and lets you change it in half-page steps. The limit only causes cuts. |
| Paper | A4. | A4 by default for a UK, Irish or New Zealand address, with Letter available in Settings. |
| Spelling | British: organised, analysed, programme, licence, behaviour. | Proposed wording and cover letters are written in British spelling when your country is set. |
| Opening | A short personal profile: three or four lines on what you do and what you are looking for. | Tailored per job from your Vault, like every other section. The heading reads Summary. |
| Personal details | Name, phone, email, town. No photo, date of birth, marital status or nationality. | The contact line has no field for any of those four. Right to work is optional and can be switched off. |
| References | Not on the CV. "Available on request" is assumed, so writing it spends a line on nothing. | Nothing is added that you did not put there. |
| File name | Your name and the role, so it survives a recruiter's downloads folder. | Priya-Shah-Operations-Manager-CV |
How do you tailor a CV to a job description?
Start from the advert, not from your CV. The person specification or the "about you" list is the brief, and on a British advert it is often split into essential and desirable criteria, which is more help than most American postings give you. The essential column is what gets you shortlisted. The desirable column decides between shortlisted people.
JobShifu does that sorting first. Each requirement is marked as matched, partial or missing against what your Vault already holds. Matched requirements decide which of your achievements move up. Missing ones are the interesting part: some are things you have genuinely not done, and some are things you did and never wrote down. JobShifu asks. A confirmed answer becomes a Vault entry and can be used on this CV and every one after it.
Then the proposals arrive, one change at a time rather than a finished document. There are five kinds: keep a line, modify it into the advert's language, remove it for this role, add a line built from confirmed experience, or combine two weaker lines into one. Every add, modify and combine names the Vault entries it draws on. A proposal that cites anything you have not confirmed is dropped before you see it.
You are not checking a CV that a model wrote. You are approving a list of specific claims, each with its source attached.
One requirement, followed through
An illustration, not a real user: an operations role at a housing association asks for "experience of managing contractors to agreed service levels".
| Current line | Responsible for day-to-day running of the repairs team. |
| Vault entry | Confirmed during review: ran the monthly performance meeting with three repairs contractors and tracked their completion times against contract. |
| Proposal | Managed three repairs contractors against contracted service levels, chairing monthly performance reviews and tracking completion times. |
| Source shown | Northgate Homes, Repairs Coordinator |
Nothing in the proposal is new information. It is the confirmed entry, phrased the way this advert phrases it, and it stays on the page only if you accept it.
Two pages changes what tailoring is for
On a one-page document, tailoring is mostly deletion. On two sides of A4 there is room for more, which makes the order of things the main decision. The top half of the first page carries your profile and the evidence for the essential criteria. Older roles move to the second page and shorten to a line or two each. A role from fifteen years ago that shows nothing this employer asked for can go altogether.
That is why the page limit in JobShifu is a maximum and never a target. A second page is allowed, not owed. If your confirmed evidence for a particular job fits on a page and a half, the CV is a page and a half, and the preview shows exactly how it will print on A4.
Will employers know a CV was tailored with AI?
What gives a machine-written CV away is that it could belong to anyone: the same adjectives, the same shape of sentence, no names, no numbers. That is the part the mechanism removes, because every proposal starts from something you confirmed about your own work. The review also flags wording that reads as generated, and you can put any line into your own words on its card before you download.
The tailoring pass runs on Anthropic's Claude. The model writes the sentences. The check that every sentence cites a confirmed Vault entry is what decides whether a sentence reaches your CV, and that check is described in full on how the Calibration Engine works.
Jobs in the UK, Ireland and New Zealand
The job search reads postings from employers' own career sites and can be narrowed to one country, so an advert you tailor for can come from the same place. Each posting links to the employer's own application page. More on where the jobs come from is on the job index page.
Frequently asked questions
How long should a CV be in the UK?
Two sides of A4 is the usual length for anyone with a few years of experience, and one side is fine for a graduate. Nobody in a UK, Irish or New Zealand hiring process will mark you down for a second page. They will mark you down for a second page of padding.
JobShifu recommends a page limit from your seniority and lets you set it yourself in half-page steps, and the limit only ever causes cuts: nothing is written to fill space.
Should a UK CV include a photo or date of birth?
No. Leave off the photo, date of birth, age, marital status and nationality. Employers are expected not to decide on any of them, so including them only gives a reader something to set aside. JobShifu's contact line has no field for any of the four.
Right to work is different: if you hold it, saying so answers a question the employer would otherwise have to ask, and it is an optional line you can switch off.
Does JobShifu write in British English?
Yes, when your country is set to the UK, Ireland or New Zealand. Proposed wording and cover letters then use British spelling (organised, analysed, programme, licence) rather than American, and the interface calls the document a CV.
Your own words are left as you wrote them: the setting governs what JobShifu proposes, not what you typed.
Will my CV be A4?
Yes, when your country is set to the UK, Ireland or New Zealand. Downloads and the on-screen preview are drawn on A4, and the page count you see is the page count that prints.
You can switch paper size in Settings, and a version you have already downloaded keeps the paper it was built on.
Can JobShifu add skills to my CV that I do not have?
No, and that is the design rather than a limitation. A proposed line has to cite an entry you confirmed in your Vault before it can reach the page. If the job asks for something you have done but never written down, JobShifu asks you about it, and once you confirm it the line can be built.
If you have not done it, it stays visible as a gap, which is worth knowing before an interview that would find it anyway.
Do I still need a cover letter?
Often, yes. Plenty of UK and Irish applications still ask for one, and public sector roles in particular ask for a supporting statement written against the person specification.
JobShifu writes cover letters from the same confirmed Vault entries as the CV, so the two documents cannot disagree about what you did.