Many job seekers start a CV rewrite by deleting most of what they already have. They’ve read online that recruiters hate long profiles, that bullet points must be brief, or that CVs should only be one page. So they strip everything out and rebuild from scratch. It feels fresh, but often they end up with something worse.
G. K. Chesterton would have warned against that. His famous idea, known as Chesterton’s Fence, says you shouldn’t remove something until you understand why it exists. He imagined someone finding a fence across a road and deciding to tear it down because it looked pointless. A wiser person would say, “If you don’t understand why it was built, don’t touch it until you do.” The lesson applies to CVs just as much as roads and fences.
Before deleting, shortening or reformatting your CV, it helps to understand why certain conventions exist. Each part of a standard CV is there for a reason, one that has usually been tested by years of employer behaviour.
Why the traditional structure still works
A clear structure — profile, skills, work history, and education — isn’t old-fashioned. It’s practical. Recruiters scan dozens of CVs in a sitting, often spending less than a minute on each. They’re trained to find key information quickly, and they expect it to appear in familiar places.
When someone replaces that structure with something “creative,” it often slows the reader down. A marketing candidate once told me she removed her employment dates because she thought they cluttered the layout. The first employer she sent it to replied asking if she’d been unemployed for several years. The fence existed to prevent that kind of misunderstanding.
If you want to stand out, the answer isn’t to throw out the format but to strengthen what’s already there. Keep the structure, but make each section work harder. For example:
Use the profile to highlight your focus and results, not to repeat your job title.
Use bullet points that start with strong verbs and give measurable outcomes.
Keep the layout simple so the reader can move through it easily.
These changes improve the fence rather than removing it.
When advice becomes dangerous
Online career advice often tells people to ditch older features entirely; things like summaries, references, or more than one page. Yet most of these “rules” come from fragments of truth that don’t apply to everyone.
For instance, the “one-page CV” rule began in the United States, where short résumés are standard. In New Zealand, the UK and Australia, a two-page CV is both normal and preferred for most professional roles. Cutting a strong two-page document down to one page usually weakens it. The original fence was built to protect clarity, not to impose length limits.
Another example is the trend to remove the word “Profile” and start straight with text. Some people say that saves space, but recruiters often use section headings to navigate. Taking them away slows reading speed and risks key points being missed.
Even the much-maligned objective statement once served a real purpose: it told the reader what job you were applying for. In the age of online applications, that’s now shown elsewhere, but if you’re sending a CV directly to a smaller employer, a short opening line naming the target role can still help. Again, the rule isn’t wrong — it just needs context.
How to modernise safely
Chesterton’s Fence doesn’t tell you to keep everything the same. It simply asks you to understand before you change. Updating your CV should be about improvement, not rebellion.
Start by asking yourself:
What purpose does this section serve?
Do recruiters still use it to make decisions?
If I remove or change it, what will I lose?
Once you understand the reason behind each element, you can decide whether to adapt it. You might replace long paragraphs with concise bullet points because clarity still matters. You might keep your traditional format but refresh the design with cleaner spacing and a professional font. You might shorten a three-page CV because you’ve confirmed that recruiters prefer two. These are thoughtful improvements, not blind edits.
Progress through understanding
Chesterton’s point was never that fences should stay forever. It was that progress built on ignorance is fragile. A CV works the same way. You don’t have to preserve every tradition, but you should know what problem each one was created to solve.
When you understand why things are done a certain way, you can modernise with confidence. You’ll make changes that improve readability, highlight your value, and still meet employer expectations.
Before you hit delete, take a moment to ask why that part exists. You may find it still has a purpose, or that you can build something stronger in its place.