The cabin crew CV that gets read: what recruiters told me after three rejections and one offer
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#1 Rejected at the CV stage by two airlines and at the final by a third, then an offer from BA on the fourth try, and between the third and the fourth I rewrote the CV from scratch with advice from two recruiters I met at open days. This is what changed, line by line, because the CV threads here are mostly 'keep it to one page' and that is not the problem.
What was wrong with the old one
It was a list of duties. 'Responsible for serving customers. Handling complaints. Cash handling.' A recruiter reads two hundred of those a day and they all say nothing. Duties are what the job was. They want what you did.
It had a personal statement that said I was passionate about travel and customer service. So does everyone. The recruiter told me she skips the statement entirely.
It had my education first. At 24 with four years of work, the work should be first. The education is a line at the bottom.
It had a photo that was a good photo of me and a bad photo for a cabin crew application: head and shoulders, casual, smiling at a friend off camera.
What the new one does
Every job is three bullet points and every bullet is a number or a situation. 'Handled 80 to 120 customers per shift on a busy Saturday floor.' 'Resolved an average of five complaints a day, mostly about stock, without escalation.' 'Trained four new starters in the till system in my second year.' Numbers make a recruiter believe you did the thing.
The statement is two lines and it is specific: what I did, what I want, why this airline. Not passionate. Specific.
Languages with levels. 'Spanish, B1, used daily with customers' is worth more than 'Spanish (conversational)'.
The photo is the airline's spec: plain background, full length and head and shoulders, business dress, hair up, the smile you would use at the aircraft door.
One page. The recruiter was right about that too. But one page of numbers, not one page of duties.
The result
The fourth application got a video interview in six days. The recruiter at the assessment day mentioned the 'five complaints a day' line. It is the only thing anyone has ever quoted back to me from a CV.
Rewrite yours tonight. Duties out, numbers in.
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#2 Purser, and I have helped at open days: the recruiters do skip the statement, they do read the bullets, and a number in a bullet is the difference between 'next' and 'tell me about that'. Zainab has it exactly.
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#3 Ghana, applying, and my CV is the old version, every line a duty. Rewriting it tonight with numbers. Thank you for the specific example bullets, that is what I needed.
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#4 Airline recruitment adjacent now, and the photo point is the one candidates get wrong most and never find out. The wrong photo is an automatic filter at some carriers. Meet the spec exactly.
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#5 The 'trained four new starters' bullet is the kind of thing I did not think counted and now realise is exactly what counts. Applying with a rewritten CV next month.
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#6 @ahmed2002 anything where you were trusted with someone else counts double. Training, keys, closing up. Put it in.
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#7 Golden call in hand and my CV had exactly this structure because of an older thread on this forum. The recruiter at Casablanca read my bullets out loud. Numbers work.