Why Brilliant Researchers Write Forgettable CVs

Two worlds, two dialects

I came to academia sideways. Before coordinating a master’s programme and teaching branding to researchers, I had a degree in economics and a career in corporate communication, marketing and data analysis. Which means I have written CVs in both dialects, and I can tell you that they are not the same language, even when the words look identical.

Over the years I have read a great many applications from researchers, and I have noticed something curious. The people with the most extraordinary experience often write the flattest CVs. Not because they have little to say, but because academia has trained them to list rather than to tell. Publications, grants, conferences, teaching: everything goes into the inventory, neatly ordered, faithfully dated, and almost entirely silent about what any of it actually achieved.

That silence works perfectly well inside a university, where the reader already knows what a first-author paper costs in sweat. It works much less well when the reader is a hiring manager in a pharmaceutical company, a consultancy or a tech start-up, who has twelve minutes before the next meeting and no idea what an h-index is for.

An inventory is not an argument

The academic CV is, at heart, an archive. Its job is completeness: every paper, every talk, every committee, because the people evaluating it are peers who will weigh each item according to rules they share with you. The longer it gets, the better it looks. Nobody in a hiring panel for a lectureship complains that a CV is eleven pages long.

An industry CV has a different job. It is not an archive but an argument, and the argument is always the same: this person will solve problems like ours. The reader is not a peer but someone who needs to imagine you inside their organisation, doing their work, on their deadlines. Every line either helps them build that picture or gets in the way.

This is why a list of activities, however impressive, tends to fall flat. “Conducted research on protein folding” tells the reader what topic occupied you. It does not tell them that you managed a two-year project with uncertain outcomes, negotiated access to shared equipment, rescued a failed experimental design, or explained your results to people who had no reason to care. Those are exactly the things industry pays for, and they are hiding behind the verb “conducted”.

A story in two lines

The good news is that you do not need to turn your CV into a novel. A story, at its smallest, has three moves: a challenge (something was difficult, broken or uncertain), a choice (what you decided to do about it), and a consequence (what changed because you did it). Recruiters will recognise a cousin of the STAR method here, and that is no accident: it is the same structure they will use to interview you, so you might as well speak it from the first page.

The trick is compression. Each line on your CV becomes a tiny abstract, the kind you have written a hundred times for conferences, except that the result being reported is your own usefulness. A few examples, invented but very close to what I see:

Before (the inventory)	After (the story)
Published six peer-reviewed articles	Turned three years of inconsistent field data into six peer-reviewed papers, including a sampling protocol now adopted by two partner labs
Teaching assistant, Introductory Statistics (3 years)	Redesigned lab sessions for a 120-student course after spotting a sharp drop in attendance by week four; the new format held attendance and was kept by the next instructor
Presented at 12 international conferences	Explained complex results to mixed audiences of specialists, funders and policy officers in 12 countries; one ten-minute talk led to a funded collaboration
Contributed to a Horizon Europe proposal	Coordinated input from seven partners in four countries to submit a successful EU proposal under a three-week deadline

Notice what happens on the right. The topic of the research almost disappears, and the skills appear instead: data management, problem diagnosis, stakeholder communication, project coordination under pressure. Notice also that the “after” lines are only slightly longer. Stories, done well, are not padding; they are a better use of the same space.

One honest warning. The temptation, once you discover that numbers make a line shine, is to invent precision you do not have. Resist it. A recruiter who asks “how did you measure that 40% improvement?” in an interview will find out very quickly whether the number was real. If you cannot quantify, describe the scale (how many people, partners, countries, months) or the observable change (adopted, renewed, funded, reused). Those are numbers too, and they are true.

Your Rosetta Stone

Most researchers underestimate how much of their daily work already has a name in industry. It simply goes by a different one. Writing a grant proposal is, structurally, business development: you identify a funder’s priorities, build a case that your project answers them, assemble partners, cost the whole thing and pitch it against competitors. If you have won one, you have closed a deal; if you have lost several and kept going, you have the resilience every sales director dreams of.

The same translation works almost everywhere. Peer review is quality assurance with a very demanding client. Supervising master’s students is people management, complete with motivation problems, missed deadlines and the occasional crisis at eleven at night. Teaching is training and facilitation, and if you have ever kept eighty undergraduates awake on a Friday afternoon, you have skills that many corporate trainers would envy. Running a lab, managing a shared database or organising a workshop is operations. Presenting at conferences is public speaking to sceptical, expert audiences, which is harder than most boardroom presentations.

The point is not to disguise your academic past behind corporate jargon. Hiring managers can smell that from a distance, and it reads as embarrassment. The point is to make the bridge visible, so the reader does not have to build it on your behalf. Keep the academic context (“during my PhD”, “in a three-year EU project”) and put the transferable skill in the foreground. You are not pretending to be someone else; you are telling the same story to a new audience, which, as any science communicator will tell you, is the whole job.

How far can you push it?

Here comes the paradox. If you take this idea to its logical extreme and send a beautifully written two-page essay about your professional journey, you will probably not get the interview. Industry recruitment is conservative about form precisely because it reads so many CVs: the reader expects to find things in familiar places, and often a piece of software (an applicant tracking system) has already scanned the document before any human sees it. Some research funders have moved towards narrative CVs, but that format has not crossed over to companies, and sending one to an HR department is a bit like submitting a sonnet as a tax return.

So the story goes inside the structure, not instead of it. Keep the conventional skeleton: clear headings (profile, experience, education, skills), reverse chronological order, a clean layout without columns or text boxes that might confuse the software, and a length of one or two pages. Within that skeleton, make every bullet a compressed story, and borrow the exact wording of the job advert where it honestly describes what you have done, since that is what the screening software is looking for.

The one place where you can be openly narrative is the profile at the top: three or four lines that work as the trailer of the film. Something like: Molecular biologist with seven years of experience leading multi-partner research projects. I have spent my career turning messy data into decisions and explaining them to people outside my field. I am now looking to bring that combination to product development in diagnostics. Past, skills, direction: the whole arc in the space of a tweet, or rather a little more.

Your publications deserve a word too. Industry readers rarely need the full list; a short selection, chosen for relevance to the role and described in plain language, does far more work, with a link to your ORCID or Google Scholar profile for the curious. And the longer story, the one with the doubts and the turning points, has better homes than the CV: the cover letter, the “About” section on LinkedIn, and above all the interview, where a well-prepared anecdote is worth more than any bullet point. If your target field values visible work, such as communication, design or data, a small portfolio of case studies can do what no CV line ever will.

The audience has changed, not the story

What strikes me every time I help someone through this rewrite is that nothing about their experience changes. The same years, the same projects, the same papers. What changes is the question they are answering.

The academic CV answers “what have you done?”;
the industry CV answers “what can you do for us?”.

The second question is not more superficial than the first. It simply asks you to do the work of interpretation yourself, instead of trusting the reader to do it.

And this, if you think about it, is a skill researchers already have, or are at least told they should have. We spend years learning to explain our work to funders, journalists, policymakers and the occasional curious relative at Christmas lunch. The CV is just one more audience. Perhaps the hardest one, because the subject of the story is you, and talking about ourselves with clarity and without false modesty is something academia rarely teaches.

So here is a small exercise to start with. Take the three lines of your current CV you are proudest of, and for each one ask: what was difficult, what did I decide, and what changed? If you can answer, you already have a story. If you cannot, that is interesting too, and probably worth a coffee and a long think.