“Walk me through your CV” can be a tricky interview question. Many candidates slip up by simply giving the recruiter a recap of their CV, together with bullet points and dates of work! This isn’t a memory test, and your interviewer will have your CV in front of them.

So, what is your interviewer actually looking for?

What your interviewer really wants to hear

A CV is a nice way to organise your career to date, but it’s not the only way. You will have written up the relevant highlights in your cover letter. At the interview, you’ll have a third opportunity to talk about your own experiences.

Why a third time? Because this is often the hiring manager’s first real test of how you communicate something you have experienced. This will be a great indicator for how clearly you can persuade and tell your story orally, not only on paper.

Recruiters want you to help them answer their question: “Does this person’s career make sense, and does it particularly make sense for our needs?”

This is your chance to persuade your interviewer that your career so far is what led you to their door. Make your decision to apply for their role make absolute sense in the context of your career history.

Focus on the right experiences and achievements

Many hiring managers take your response as a roadmap for the rest of the interview, which should come as good news to you. Set up your responses to include the experiences and achievements that you really want to feature. The hiring manager wants to see you can identify what matters to them.

When you come to make your decision:

• Don’t give every role equal weight. Consider instead focusing on the most relevant experience for the job you have applied to. This means featuring the biggest relevant achievements, promotions or increased responsibility. We think relevance always wins over prestige, so aim to focus on the achievements that bode well for the position.
• Make transitions work for you. If you have had any career changes over the last five years, consider what story you can tell about the move from one to the other that could positively impact this new role. Perhaps they gave you the breadth of experience that your employers needed. Explaining the purpose behind your transitions will also help you make your CV sound like a career with progression rather than a list of jobs.
• Keep the temporal structure of your work experience. Moving back and forth across time will only confuse your hiring manager. Keep your history moving forward!
• Mention anything unusual on your CV. It’s so important to keep focus on your main achievements and experience, but if you have gaps in your CV, don’t think you’ll get away with pointing your hiring manager in a different direction!  

How to structure your answer to the question “Walk me through your CV”

Keep the linear history of your career progression intact!

Start with a brief overview

Detail what the theme of your career has been, and highlight the difference between where you started to where you are today. The timeline is what holds the structure of your story; the theme is what keeps them interested. Theme should be where you see yourself excelling over time. Perhaps you developed great leadership skills or became more knowledgeable about a business area. Identify one or two themes for your career, and keep those in mind while you work through your response. Some themes might be:

• Building teams
• Technical expertise
• Problem solving
• Leadership
• Working internationally
• Moving from specialist to generalist

Walk through your most important roles

What were your responsibilities and what did you achieve? Next, explain why you moved on from each role with an indication of what you have become particularly good at. And finally…

Consider the future

This means the position you’re applying to! Answer why this opportunity makes sense as the next major step in your career, and what you’re excited to do next.

Take some time with your response; your hiring manager will want you to tell them a story. Two to four minutes is usually a good rule of thumb. The more relevant the experience, the more detail you give.

As always, try not to memorise your responses. Write down the main points and practice with a friend. Small deviations are fine as long as you stick to the key points! The best answers are those where candidates sound like they’ve made sense of their career trajectory and know where it’s headed.

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We hope we have helped you answer this tough interview question! We have a heap of deep-dives into other popular questions asked at interview:

• Tell us about yourself.
• What motivates you at work?
• What are your goals?
• What are you looking for in a new position?
• What is your leadership style?
• Why should we hire you?
• Have you got any questions for us?
• Where do you see yourself in 5 years?
• How Do You Approach Learning Something New?
• Describe a Conflict You Had With a Team Member and How You Resolved It

If there is a tough interview question that you always struggle to answer, follow us on Instagram or LinkedIn. Let’s keep the conversation going!