A free guide from N-Access
The N-Access CV Optimiser
Two proven CV templates plus a step-by-step prompt to adapt them to any job using AI.
Built by N-Access
How to use this guide
This guide gives you two things: two CV templates that have worked for real candidates across very different industries, and a workflow for adapting either one to a specific job using any large language model.
It is for anyone applying for jobs who wants to use AI to do the boring tailoring work for them — graduates, career changers, people returning to work, senior professionals, technical specialists, anyone in between.
You do not need a paid AI tool. The free tier of ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or any other modern LLM will do this comfortably. The quality of the output depends far more on what you put into the prompt than on which model you use.
Template A
The Harvard / FAANG CV
The canonical single-column tech CV. Big name at the top, hairline section dividers, bullet-driven experience focused on impact and metrics. ATS-friendly out of the box and instantly familiar to recruiters at FAANG and high-bar tech.
JORDAN LEE
+44 7700 900184 | jordan.lee@example.com | London, UK
Professional Summary
Senior software engineer with 8 years of experience building large-scale consumer and infrastructure systems at Stripe, Cloudflare and a Series C developer-tools startup. Strong interest in payments, distributed systems and developer experience. Comfortable owning a problem from architecture through production rollout, and recently led a backend rewrite that cut p95 latency from 412ms to 78ms across a tier-zero service. Looking for a senior IC role where I can keep building deep systems and mentor engineers around me.
Experience
Stripe, Remote (UK)
- Led the rebuild of the dispute-handling pipeline serving 3M+ events per day, cutting p95 end-to-end latency from 412ms to 78ms and eliminating roughly 1,800 weekly customer-facing timeouts.
- Reduced on-call paging volume on the same pipeline by 64% over two quarters through targeted reliability work.
- Designed and ran the migration in three controlled phases across 11 regions; the post-launch retro became the team's default playbook.
- Mentored two engineers through senior promotion. Stack: Go, Kafka, Postgres, Kubernetes.
Cloudflare, London, UK
- Owned a critical caching layer used by 25% of Workers traffic; shipped a new cache key strategy that improved hit ratio by 11pp and cut origin egress costs by an estimated $2.1M annualised.
- Authored the design doc that kicked off the Workers KV durability project, later adopted across the platform team.
Vercel (then ZEIT), Remote
- Built the first version of the build artefact storage layer used by every deployment on the platform.
- Designed the API, implemented the service in Node.js, and ran the migration from the legacy storage system with zero customer-visible downtime.
Improbable, London, UK
- Shipped a distributed metrics aggregation tool on the SpatialOS infrastructure team, reducing engineer time-to-debug for cross-region simulation issues from hours to under 15 minutes.
Technical Skills
Go, TypeScript, Python, Rust (working knowledge), SQL
Kubernetes, Kafka, Postgres, Redis, gRPC, Envoy, Temporal, AWS, GCP
Distributed systems design, observability, capacity planning, incident command, postmortems, design reviews, technical writing
Selected Talks
- “Boring Reliability Wins” — QCon London 2024
- “Designing for the 99th Percentile” — SREcon EMEA 2023
Education
MEng Computing — First Class Honours
When to use it
- —Tech roles — engineering, product, data and design at scale-ups and big tech.
- —FAANG-style applications and other interview processes that go deep on impact.
- —US-style applications where a fuller, denser CV is normal and expected.
- —Senior individual contributors and staff-level engineers with measurable wins to showcase.
- —Consulting, finance and academic-adjacent roles that reward density and rigour.
Why it works
- —Bullet-led experience puts impact metrics front and centre on every line.
- —Single-column layout parses cleanly through ATS scanners — keywords land where recruiters and engines look for them.
- —Signals seriousness — the format itself reads as a senior, technical CV.
- —Demonstrates depth without sacrificing scannability — the structure does the recruiter's work for them.
- —Familiar to engineering hiring managers — the canonical format used in top schools and tech companies.
Template B
The One-Page CV
Compact two-column layout. Paragraph-style experience on the left tells the story of what you did and why it mattered. A dense achievements and skills sidebar on the right gives a recruiter a 10-second scan. Designed to fit substantial content on a single A4 page.
+44 7700 900184
jordan.lee@example.com
ABOUT ME
Senior Product Manager with 7+ years of experience leading consumer and B2B products at Monzo, Deliveroo and a Series B fintech startup. Shipped a checkout redesign that lifted conversion by 18% and managed a cross-functional team of 12 across engineering, design and data. Comfortable operating from discovery through to scale, with a bias for shipping small, measurable changes. Looking for a senior PM role where I can combine product strategy with hands-on execution on a product people love.
Experience
May 2022 – Present
Senior Product Manager
Led the redesign of the joint accounts onboarding flow, increasing weekly activations by 31% within two quarters and reducing drop-off at the ID verification step from 24% to 9%. Owned the lending discovery roadmap end-to-end, partnering with 4 engineers, 2 designers, a researcher and risk to ship 9 experiments in 6 months — three rolled out to all 7M+ personal account customers. Built a lightweight prioritisation framework adopted across the wider Borrowing tribe, cutting weekly planning overhead by an estimated 4 hours per squad and giving leadership a single view of bets. Coached two associate PMs through promotion.
Sep 2019 – Apr 2022
Product Manager
Owned restaurant-side discovery for the Plus subscription product, defining the opportunity and shipping three iterations that grew partner adoption by 47% year-on-year. Partnered with data science to introduce a new recommendation surface on the restaurant home, contributing an incremental £3.2M in annualised order value based on a controlled rollout across the UK and Ireland. Ran weekly customer interviews and synthesised findings into a shared opportunity tree that became the team's default planning artefact.
Jul 2017 – Aug 2019
Associate Product Manager
Shipped the first in-app smart meter reading flow, reducing customer support tickets related to manual readings by 22% in the first quarter. Worked alongside the data team to build a churn early-warning dashboard used by retention to recover an estimated £480K of annualised revenue in year one.
Sep 2015 – Jun 2017
Business Analyst, Graduate Scheme
Rotated across digital banking, risk and operations. Final placement delivered a process redesign saving the mortgages team 1,100 manual hours per year.
Key Achievements
- 31% increase in weekly activations on Monzo joint accounts; ID verification drop-off reduced from 24% to 9%.
- 9 experiments shipped in 6 months on Monzo lending; three rolled out to 7M+ personal account customers.
- 47% YoY growth in partner adoption on Deliveroo Plus subscription.
- £3.2M incremental annualised order value from a Deliveroo recommendation surface.
- 22% reduction in support tickets via Octopus smart meter in-app flow; £480K annualised revenue recovered through churn dashboard.
- Coached three associate PMs through promotion across two organisations.
Skills
Continuous discovery, opportunity solution trees, JTBD interviews, North Star metric design, A/B testing, experimentation review
Linear, Figma, Amplitude, Mixpanel, Looker, Mode, Notion, Productboard, FullStory, Statsig
Dual-track agile, OKRs, stakeholder management, technical scoping, written communication (PRDs, narratives, weekly updates)
SQL (intermediate), basic Python for analysis, hypothesis-led experimentation, cohort and funnel analysis
Education
2012 – 2015
BSc (Hons) Economics & Mathematics — First Class
Side Projects
- Saturday Build Club (2023 – present): free monthly workshop in South London helping 40+ early-career PMs and designers ship side projects.
- Mind Volunteer Mentor (2021 – present): 1:1 mentoring for adults re-entering the workforce after a mental health break.
When to use it
- —Recent graduates and people in the first 5–7 years of their career.
- —Career changers who want to lead with a clear narrative, not a long history.
- —UK and European roles, especially professional services, consulting and operations.
- —Generalist product, programme and people-facing roles where brevity signals confidence.
- —Applications where a recruiter will scan in 30 seconds before deciding to read further.
Why it works
- —Two-column layout fits more substance into a single page than a strict single-column format.
- —Paragraph experience on the left lets you tell the story of what you did and why it mattered.
- —The achievements sidebar gives recruiters a 10-second summary of impact at a glance.
- —Familiar to UK and European hiring conventions — feels professional without looking corporate.
- —Works across industries — the sidebar adapts cleanly to product, ops, consulting and generalist roles.
The workflow
Adapt your template to a specific job using AI
Six steps. Should take you 15–30 minutes per application. Faster the second time you do it.
Already have a CV?
You can skip the template-filling. Paste your existing CV alongside one of the templates above and the prompt below into your AI tool, then ask the model to optimise your CV using the template's structure as a guide and tailor it to the job description. Same prompt, no rewriting from scratch.
- 1
Choose the right template
Look back at the “When to use it” sections above and pick the one that matches the role and industry you are applying for. If in doubt, Template A is the right choice for technical and US-style applications, Template B for non-technical, UK and European roles.
- 2
Copy the template content
Copy the full content of the template you chose from this guide (or from the downloaded PDF). You can paste it straight into your AI tool — the structure carries over fine as plain text.
- 3
- 4
Paste this prompt
Copy the prompt below into your AI tool. Fill in the three bracketed sections with the job description, the template, and your real background details. Bullet points are fine in your background notes — the AI will turn them into proper CV copy.
I have a CV template I want to adapt for a specific job. Here is the job description I'm applying for: [PASTE THE JOB DESCRIPTION HERE] Here is the CV template I want to use: [PASTE THE TEMPLATE CONTENT HERE] Here are the details about my background that I want to weave into the CV. Replace the placeholder content with content based on what I tell you below, and keep the structure of the template exactly as-is: [ADD YOUR REAL DETAILS HERE - your past roles, education, skills, achievements, anything you want included. Bullet points are fine, the AI will turn them into proper CV copy.] Tailor the language, keywords, and emphasis to match the job description above. Be specific. Use action verbs. Include impact metrics where possible. Return the complete CV in the same format as the template.
- 5
Review the output critically
The AI will give you a strong first draft, but never trust it blindly. Read every line. Check that every claim is true. Rewrite anything that sounds generic or does not sound like you. If the model invented an achievement you did not mention, delete it.
- 6
Save your finished CV as a PDF
Paste the final version into Google Docs, Word, or your editor of choice, fix any formatting that drifted, and export as PDF. Most word processors have a “Download as PDF” option built in.
Pro tips
Ten things that make the difference
- 1
Tailor for every job. Never send the same CV twice.
- 2
Match keywords from the job description exactly. ATS systems scan for them.
- 3
Quantify your impact with numbers, percentages and scale wherever you can.
- 4
Save your details as a master document you reuse for every prompt.
- 5
Do not oversell. The interview will catch you out within minutes.
- 6
If the AI hallucinates an achievement, delete it. Every time.
- 7
Check the formatting after pasting the AI output back into your editor.
- 8
Always proofread once more before sending. Read it out loud if you can.
- 9
Lock the localisation. If your CV is in UK English, tell the model directly — otherwise 'organise' and 'colour' will quietly become 'organize' and 'color'.
- 10
Paste the full job description into the prompt, not just the role title. Rich context is the difference between a tailored CV and a generic one.