The one-page finance CV, built for Kenyan recruiting

Your CV has one job, and it is smaller than you think.

It is not to describe you. It is not to be comprehensive. It is to survive a fast scan by a tired person with a stack of them, and produce one thought: this one is worth twenty minutes. That is the whole brief. Everything on the page either serves that or is taking up room.

Most Kenyan student CVs fail not because the person is unimpressive, but because the page makes the reader work. The information is all there — arranged so that nothing is findable.

One page. This is not negotiable yet.

A second page is something you earn with a decade of work. As a student or a recent graduate, a two-page CV reads as an inability to judge what matters — which is, unfortunately, a direct comment on the skill being hired for.

If you cannot get to one page, you are not writing too much. You are keeping things that are not doing any work. The section below is mostly about which ones.

The order

Top to bottom, in the order a reader's eye actually travels:

1. Name and contact. Name, phone number, email, LinkedIn if it is complete. Two lines, maximum. No address — nobody is posting you a letter, and a Nairobi estate name tells a stranger things about you that are not their business.

2. Education. While you are a student or within two years of graduating, this goes above experience. Institution, degree, expected or awarded classification, year. If your class of degree is strong, it goes on the page. If it is not yet decided, write "expected 2027" and leave it.

3. Experience. Attachments, internships, part-time work, the hustle. In reverse order. This is the section that decides the outcome and it gets the most space.

4. Leadership and activities. Societies, a sports team, a student investment club, church committee, a business you ran. Two or three lines. Real ones only.

5. Skills and interests. Three lines at the very most. This is the last thing on the page for a reason.

That order changes exactly once: after about two years of work, experience moves above education and education shrinks to one line. Not before.

The bullet is the whole game

Every line in your experience section is doing one of two things. It is describing a duty, or it is demonstrating a result. Only one of those gets you interviewed.

A duty bullet tells the reader what you were told to do:

Responsible for assisting the finance department with reconciliation and reporting duties.

A result bullet tells them what changed because you were there:

Rebuilt the monthly bank reconciliation in Excel, cutting it from two days to four hours and clearing a backlog of 60 unmatched items.

Same job. The second one is evidence. The first one is a job description someone else wrote.

The shape that works, every time:

Verb → what you actually did → what changed, in a number.

The number is the part people skip, and it is the part that works. You almost always have one. How many items, how many hours, how many people, how much money, how much faster, how many percent. If you genuinely cannot quantify it, quantify the scale instead: "across 14 branches", "for a 200-member SACCO". Scale is a number too.

Six things costing you space

The objective statement. "To secure a challenging position in a reputable organisation where I can utilise my skills." This says nothing, it says it in the most valuable real estate on the page, and every third CV in the stack says it too. Delete it. If you want a line at the top, make it a one-line summary with actual content: "Third-year BCom (Finance) student; Treasury attachment at [employer]; built and manage a live KSh 40,000 NSE and MMF portfolio."

Your photo. It adds nothing to the assessment, it takes a sixth of the page, and it invites bias you have no reason to invite. Leave it off unless the employer explicitly asks.

Date of birth, marital status, religion, ID number, KRA PIN. None of these are anybody's business at application stage and none of them help you. The ID and PIN come up at offer stage, in a form, securely. A CV is a document you email to strangers.

"References available on request." Everybody knows. It is four words of nothing. Either list two referees with their permission — name, title, organisation, contact — or omit the section entirely and provide them when asked.

Software you cannot actually use. If Bloomberg is on your CV, you will be asked what you use it for. The same goes for Python, SQL, STATA and "financial modelling". Put down what survives a follow-up question. A CV that claims eight tools and folds on the first one is worse than a CV that claims two and stands.

A skills bar chart. Excel at 85%. Out of what? Measured how? It is a decoration pretending to be data, on a document applying for a job where the difference between those two things is the entire point.

The scan test

Print it, or look at it on a phone. Give yourself ten seconds. Then look away and say out loud: who is this person, what have they actually done, and what are they applying for.

If you cannot answer all three, the reader will not either — and they are giving it less attention than you just did.

A note on the online form

A lot of Kenyan graduate programmes will not take your beautiful CV at all. They will put you through an application portal that asks for the same information in boxes, sometimes with the CV attached as an afterthought.

Two consequences worth planning for. First, the fields are usually not optional and often want exact figures — your KCSE mean grade, your unit-by-unit results, the exact month an attachment started and ended. Have a plain text file with all of it ready before you start, because assembling it under a deadline is how people give up halfway through a form.

Second, formatting travels badly through these systems. Keep the CV itself structurally simple — real text, one column, standard headings, no text boxes and no tables — so that whatever the portal does to it on the way through, the content still arrives.

Practise the version you will be asked for

The CV gets you the conversation. The conversation is a different skill, and it is the one that actually decides the outcome — including the moment they look at your own CV and ask you to walk them through it.

That is a thirty-second answer with a structure, and it is worth rehearsing out loud before anybody asks you for it.