How to write a CV in NZ (and get it read)

A New Zealand CV is short, factual and focused on what you have done. If you are arriving from overseas, or you have not updated yours in a decade, these are the conventions employers here expect:

• Two to three pages. Senior candidates with long careers can stretch to four, but the first page has to earn the second. Anything older than 15 years can be a one-line entry.
• No photo. Photos are not the norm in NZ and most hiring managers would rather not have one. The same goes for your date of birth, marital status, nationality and passport details. Leave them off.
• A right-to-work line. One sentence near the top: "New Zealand citizen", "NZ permanent resident" or "Holder of an Accredited Employer Work Visa, valid to [date]". Employers need to know this, and if you do not tell them they will guess.
• Referees available on request. You do not need to list referee names and phone numbers on the CV itself. Say they are available and have two or three lined up, with their permission, for when you reach offer stage.
• NZ English. Organisation, specialise, programme, labour. Spelling is a small tell, but it is a tell.
• PDF, sensibly named. "Jane-Smith-CV.pdf", not "CV final v3 (2).docx".

Cover letters are still expected for most direct applications, and they are still read. Keep it to half a page and use it to say why this role and this company, not to repeat your CV.

This is the order we recommend and the order most hiring managers read in. The example lines are for a senior operations or engineering professional, because that is who we place most often, but the structure holds for finance, supply chain, quality and sales roles too.

1. Header

Your name, the city you live in (not your full street address), phone, email and LinkedIn URL. Then your right-to-work line. That is all.

2. Professional summary

Three to five lines that say who you are, what you are good at and what you are looking for. This is the part most people get wrong. Skip the adjectives and lead with facts.

Example: "Operations Manager with 14 years in food and beverage manufacturing, the last six leading a 24/7 site of 120 people. Lean Six Sigma Black Belt. Delivered a 22% reduction in unplanned downtime and led the site through its last two MPI audits without a major finding. Looking for a plant or operations leadership role in the Waikato."

3. Key skills

Six to ten short items, ideally matched to the language in the job ad. For an engineering or operations CV that might be: continuous improvement, production planning, capex projects, health and safety leadership, SAP or another ERP, budget ownership, people leadership, quality systems.

4. Career history

Reverse chronological. For each role: company, one line on what the company does and its size, your title, dates (month and year), then achievements. Achievements are not duties. "Responsible for maintenance" is a duty. "Cut reactive maintenance from 60% to 35% of hours in 18 months by introducing a planned maintenance programme" is an achievement.

Example bullets:

• Led a team of 45 across three shifts, reducing staff turnover from 28% to 11% in two years.
• Delivered a $2.4m line upgrade on time and 6% under budget, lifting throughput by 18%.
• Owned the site H&S system; TRIFR reduced from 14.2 to 4.1 over three years.
• Managed a $9m operating budget with direct accountability for labour, maintenance and consumables.

Three to six bullets for recent roles, one or two for older ones. Numbers wherever you honestly can.

5. Qualifications and training

Degrees, trade certificates, professional memberships (Engineering New Zealand, CA ANZ, NZISM) and the certifications that matter in your field: Lean, PRINCE2, HACCP, first aid, forklift, whatever is relevant. Include the year for anything with an expiry.

6. Referees

"Referees available on request" is enough. Most NZ employers will ask for two, usually a recent manager and one other. Line them up early and tell them what the role is.

Your CV has two readers and they want opposite things.

The applicant tracking system that most mid-sized NZ employers and every agency uses will parse your CV into fields. It handles simple, single-column layouts well. It struggles with text boxes, tables, columns, icons, headers and footers, and anything designed in Canva. If your CV is a graphic, it may arrive as a blank record. Use a plain layout with clear headings (Experience, Qualifications, Skills) and standard fonts, and put the job titles and skills the ad uses somewhere in the document, in words, not images.

The recruiter or hiring manager is reading on a phone between meetings and will give you about thirty seconds before deciding whether to read properly. That means your summary and your last two roles have to carry the argument. Put the most impressive, relevant, quantified thing you have done on the first page. If they have to hunt for it, they will not.

We read CVs for a living, and we would rather have a clear, slightly plain document than a beautiful one we cannot search. The same is true of the hiring managers we work with in manufacturing and engineering.

• A CV that is not tailored. The same document sent to a plant manager role and a supply chain role reads as if you are not sure what you want. Change the summary and reorder the skills for every application. It takes ten minutes.
• Duties instead of results. Copying your position description into your CV tells us what you were meant to do, not what you did.
• Unexplained gaps. Gaps are fine. Unexplained gaps make people guess. "2023: career break, family relocation to Hamilton" is all it needs.
• Vague dates and inflated titles. Years only, or a title bigger than the one your referee will confirm, both get found out at reference stage.
• Too long. Seven pages does not make you look experienced. It makes you look like you cannot prioritise, which is a problem in an operations leader.
• Typos in the summary. The first paragraph is the one everyone reads. Have someone else proof it.
• Personal information that should not be there. Photo, age, religion, whether you have children. None of it belongs and employers here do not want it.
• Missing the right-to-work line. Especially for candidates with overseas experience. If it is not stated, employers assume the harder answer.

Save it as a PDF, name it properly and keep a master version you can adapt quickly. Then put it to work.

If you see a role you like on our job board, apply through it and you will hear back from a real person. If nothing fits right now, submit your CV and we will keep it on file for the senior operations, engineering, supply chain, technical, finance and sales roles we fill across the Waikato and NZ. A good number of the people we place were not looking when we first spoke to them.

And if you want a second opinion on your CV before you send it anywhere, ask. We read CVs every day and we will tell you honestly what is working. Once it is in good shape, our guides on interviewing in NZ and working with a recruiter cover the next two steps.