3 Great Executive CV Examples (+How to Write an Executive CV)

If you operate at executive level, you’ll need an effective CV that illustrates your competencies and conveys your suitability to take on executive roles. Your executive CV needs to make you stand out from the competition.

In this guide, we’ll show you how to do exactly that. We’ll walk you through the steps involved in preparing a powerful executive CV that lands job interviews.

This CV writing guide is designed for all executive and C-suite professionals, including CEOs, executive directors, chief operating officers, chief information officers, chief financial officers and chief marketing officers.

Executive CVs should begin with a succinct professional profile. Often referred to as a summary or personal statement, the professional profile is a brief introduction to your CV that touches on your experiences, skills, accomplishments and suitability for the position you’re pursuing.

Professional profiles provides you with the opportunity to pitch the experiences, skills and achievements that make you stand out.

As an executive, your professional profile should focus on high levels experiences, skills and achievements, as well as your unique selling point. Are you an expert at leading mergers and acquisitions? Have you got a track record of generating exponential growth? These are the type of selling points you can showcase in your professional profile.

Here is an example of an executive CV’s professional profile:

Progressive, forward-looking CEO with over 15 years’ experience providing strategic and operational leadership to large organisations, including Fortune 500 companies. Recent successes include growing revenue by over 221% and orchestrating the acquisition of four large companies.

Passionate about building customer-oriented cultures and transforming processes to improve business performance and generate growth.

Include a skill section on your executive CV to illustrate the key skills that you bring to the table.

When preparing the skills section of your executive CV, focus on advanced, high-level skills. Don’t highlight skills that are considered low-level or entry-level, unless they’re highly relevant to the position you’re pursuing.

Likewise, avoid placing too much focus on soft skills, such as organisation and time management. While such skills are key for those at all levels, they don’t add much weight to your CV unless they’re backed up with examples of times you’ve utilised them. The skills section is a brief snapshot of your most important executive skills, so focus only on hard skills that are key to your role as an executive.

Examples of key skills for executive CVs include business restructuring, strategy development and change management.

Here is an example of an executive CV’s skills section:

The career summary is an overview of your employment history. It provides you with the opportunity to highlight your experiences and achievements in executive positions.

In this section, you can show the reader how you’ve made a difference in executive positions and enable them to envision how you can make a difference in future positions.

List your work experience using the reverse-chronological format, starting with your most recent position and working backwords. Include your position title, company name, location and dates of employment.

Don’t forget to include some information about the company and an overview of your role to provide some context. Touch on specific details, such as number of direct reports, the size of the company and budget sizes. This information helps recruiters understand your role as an executive.

Highlight a few of your strongest achievements for each position.

Achievements are a great way of making your CV stand out. They demonstrate your ability to get results and show recruiters how you can add value as an executive.

Use numbers and metrics to bolster your achievements and make them shine. Here is an example of an executive's achievement that makes use of numbers:

‘Reduced expenditure by 22% by renegotiating contracts and building new relationships’.

If you’ve obtained any non-executive or board experience, highlight it in this section.

If possible, showcase accomplishments and successes associated with your non-exec positions. However, it’s also acceptable to go into less detail than you did with your executive experiences. Oftentimes, simply listing the position, company/organisation and dates is sufficient.

Skip this section if you don’t have any non-executive experience.

Now it’s time to detail your education and training. Start by listing your highest form of education, followed by your other qualifications and training courses.

Only list training that is relevant to executive positions. For example, it would be beneficial to include advanced leadership training. On the other hand, it would be wise to omit time management training. Listing low-level training will take the focus away from your more relevant courses.

When including your education and training, list the name of the qualification, followed by the grade achieved, the name of the organisation/university and the dates of study.

Use the final section of your CV to highlight any additional information. This may include language proficiency, awards, memberships and affiliations.

There may be a number of further sections that you should include on your executive CV, depending on your experience.

Further sections to consider adding to your CV include presentations, conferences, honours and awards and voluntary experience.

Many recruiters use Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) to filter and rank applicants’ CVs based on specific keywords. CVs that are not optimised for ATS fall down the list and may not be even looked at by recruiters.

As such, it’s important to optimise your CV for ATS.

One of the best ways of doing this is to pepper keywords throughout your CV. Such keywords are related to skills, qualifications and university names.

To identify the most relevant keywords, analyse the job description or job spec for the position you’re pursing. This will give you an idea of the essential requirements for the position. These essential requirements are important keywords to include on your CV.

Professional formatting and presentation are also vital when it comes to ATS optimisation. Poor formatting and presentation can result in ATS struggling to read your CV.

Use the CV templates in this guide, which are optimised for ATS, to make sure you beat the ATS bots.

Executive CVs are often much longer than CVs for professionals at lower levels, often extending to multiple pages in length.

However, the optimal length for executive CVs is two or three pages. This length ensures your CV is concise and makes for a pleasant reading experience.

Include a link to your LinkedIn profile on your CV. Sending recruiters to an impressive, polished LinkedIn profile that demonstrates your value as an executive can be very beneficial when applying for jobs.

However, only include your LinkedIn URL if you have a solid, professional LinkedIn profile. Linking to a bare-bones or unprofessional LinkedIn profile can actually have negative impact on your job search.

Want to improve your LinkedIn profile? View 15 great LinkedIn headline examples. Or take a look at our 20 LinkedIn summary examples.

If you’re not confident that you can convey your experiences, achievements and suitability for roles as an executive on your CV, consider using a professional CV writing service.

A professional CV writer should be able to present you as an ideal candidate for roles by illustrating your value and making you stand out.

View CV Nation's executive CV service.

Hopefully you’ve found this guide helpful. Feel free to make use of our executive CV templates to enhance your job search. For more in-depth CV writing assistance, view our ultimate guide on how to write a CV, which focuses on all aspects of the CV writing process.

Or view our guide to executive job interviews, which includes 20 of the most common executive job interview questions and answers.