IV.Personal · March 2026
Why I keep rebuilding my CV instead of finishing it.
A CV is supposed to summarise a career. Mine keeps trying to summarise a person. That's why it's never done — and why I'm starting to think 'done' was the wrong target all along.
By Gisella Famà · 3 min read · Personal
I have rebuilt my CV roughly four times in the past two years. Not edited. Rebuilt. New structure, new tone, new layout, new opinion about what a CV is even for. Each time I tell myself this is the version that will stick. Each time, six months later, I open the file and feel a small, specific kind of embarrassment.
For a long time I thought this was a discipline problem. Then a perfectionism problem. Then an avoidance problem. It is none of those. It is the gap between what a CV is built to do and what I keep asking mine to do.
"A CV is a resume of work. I keep trying to write a resume of judgement. The format pushes back, every time."
What a CV is actually for
A CV is a logistics document. It tells a hiring manager, in under thirty seconds, whether you are the kind of person who has done the kind of thing they need done. That is it. It is not your story. It is not your worldview. It is a filter, optimised for skim-reading by someone who is already late.
Nobody told me this for the first ten years of my career. So I wrote CVs that tried to be small autobiographies — careful, considered, slightly defensive. They were beautiful. They were also unreadable in thirty seconds, which meant they were, functionally, broken.
Why I keep restarting
My work has changed shape. The taxonomy of "designer" has stretched so far that the same job title now means six different jobs, and a CV has to pick one.
I keep wanting to put the interesting parts first — the bets, the failures, the things I learned the hard way. CVs do not have a column for that.
Every version is a snapshot of who I thought I was at the time. Looking back at last year's CV is like looking at a haircut you can't believe you signed off on.
And, honestly: rebuilding the CV is easier than asking the harder question of what I actually want to do next.
The slightly uncomfortable truth
I don't think CVs are very useful anymore, for people more than ten years in. A link to three things you actually made, with one paragraph about what you learned making them, will tell a smart hiring manager more than four pages of bullet points ever could. The CV survives because it's a ritual, not because it works.
And yet I keep rebuilding mine, because the ritual is also a way of asking, again, what I'm doing with this career. Every restructure is a quiet reorganisation of my own priorities. The document is the by-product. The thinking is the point.
What I'm doing about it
I have stopped trying to finish my CV. I keep it short, honest, and good enough to send if someone asks. The energy I used to pour into restructuring it now goes into the work itself, and into writing things like this — which, it turns out, do a much better job of telling someone whether they want to work with me.
"Your CV is not your portfolio. Your portfolio is not your voice. Your voice is the thing nobody can copy, so put it somewhere it can actually be heard."
If you, too, are on your fourth rebuild this year, consider that the problem might not be the CV. It might be that you have outgrown what the format can hold. Build the smaller, duller CV. Then put your real self somewhere else. Mine is here, on this page, probably contradicting itself in six months.
Disagree? That's the point. Tell me why.
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