How to Write a CV That Gets Interviews in Nigeria (2026 Guide)
PadiYour CV has one job: get you an interview. Not tell your life story. Not list every responsibility you've ever had. Just convince a recruiter, in about 8 seconds, that you're worth talking to.
Here's how to do that in the Nigerian job market.
The right CV format for Nigeria
In Nigeria, a reverse chronological CV is still the default. Skills-based (functional) CVs are not widely used outside creative industries. Keep it clean, 1–2 pages depending on experience level.
Length:
- 0–5 years experience: 1 page maximum
- 5+ years: 2 pages
- Academic or specialist roles: up to 3 pages if genuinely needed
Font: Calibri, Garamond, or Georgia at 10–11pt. No Comic Sans. No Times New Roman, it reads as outdated.
Margins: 1.5cm all sides. Give the content room.
Section order that works
- Name + contact info
- Professional summary (3–4 lines)
- Skills (8–12 bullet points)
- Work experience (reverse chronological)
- Education
- Certifications (if relevant)
1. Contact section
Include full name, phone number, email, city, LinkedIn URL (if active).
Do not include date of birth, marital status, religion, or photo. These are not required in Nigeria despite old templates suggesting otherwise. They add no value and can introduce unconscious bias.
Email: If your email is peterlove2003@yahoo.com, create a professional Gmail: peter.okonkwo@gmail.com.
2. Professional summary
This is the most skipped and most valuable section. 3–4 sentences maximum. Answer:
- What you do
- How many years you've done it
- One or two concrete outcomes
Weak example:
"A hardworking and dedicated professional with experience in various roles seeking opportunities for growth."
Strong example:
"Finance analyst with 6 years at Sterling Bank, specialising in credit risk and SME portfolio management. Reduced non-performing loan ratio by 12% in 2024 through revised scoring model. Seeking senior analyst or team lead roles in commercial banking."
3. Skills section
ATS systems (applicant tracking software) scan for keywords before a human ever reads your CV. Many Nigerian companies, and virtually all multinational, tech, and fintech employers, use ATS.
List your skills explicitly. Don't assume the recruiter will infer that you know Excel from reading about your past roles.
Format as a 2-column bullet list:
- Financial modelling
- Credit risk analysis
- SQL / data analysis
- Power BI
- Microsoft Excel (advanced)
- Team leadership
Match your skills to the job description. If the role says "Python scripting" and you know Python, it better appear in your skills section.
4. Work experience (the most important section)
Each role should have:
- Job title (exact, not inflated)
- Company name
- Dates (month/year to month/year)
- 3–6 bullet points of achievements, not duties
The shift: duties to achievements
Duties tell me what your job was. Achievements tell me what you did with it.
| Duty (weak) | Achievement (strong) |
|---|---|
| Responsible for sales in Lagos region | Grew Lagos region revenue 34% YoY to ₦280M in FY2024 |
| Managed a team of developers | Led 4-person team to deliver core banking integration 3 weeks ahead of deadline |
| Handled customer complaints | Reduced ticket resolution time from 72h to 18h, lifting CSAT from 3.2 to 4.6/5 |
If you don't have numbers, use scope. "Led training sessions for 200+ field agents" is still stronger than "Trained agents."
Tense: Use past tense for past roles. Present tense for your current role.
5. Education
Unless you're fresh out of university, education comes after experience. Include:
- Degree, class of degree (if second class upper or first class, list it)
- Institution name
- Graduation year
Do not pad this section with secondary school results unless you have fewer than 2 years of experience.
6. Common Nigerian CV mistakes
Using an "objective" instead of a summary. Objectives focus on what you want from a company. Summaries focus on what you offer. Recruiters care about the latter.
Tables and text boxes. Many people use table-heavy Word templates. These break ATS parsing. Use a simple single column layout.
"References available on request." This is filler. Remove it. No one needs to see it.
Listing NYSC as experience. Only include NYSC if you held a substantive role during that year. "NYSC corper, general duties" is not a meaningful entry.
One CV for every job. Tailor at minimum your summary and skills to each application. Takes 5 minutes and meaningfully improves response rates.
How HirePadi reads your CV
When you upload a CV to HirePadi, the platform extracts your skills, experience, and seniority level, then runs vector similarity matching against every new job scraped daily. The match score (0–100) tells you how well your background aligns before you even read the job description.
This means a well structured CV with clear skills sections will consistently get higher match scores than a duties-heavy CV with the same actual experience.