NZ CV Template: How to Write a CV for New Zealand Jobs

A New Zealand CV is a short, plain, evidence-based document. Two pages is the target, three at the outside, and almost everything on it should answer one question: can this person do the job we advertised?

That sounds obvious, yet plenty of CVs sent to NZ employers still arrive in formats borrowed from other countries. They run to five pages. They carry a photo, a date of birth, a full home address and a paragraph praising the applicant’s own work ethic. None of that helps here. Some of it works against you, because NZ employers are not allowed to make hiring decisions based on things like your age, sex, marital status or religion. Leave those details off and the reader has nothing to look at except your skills and experience, which is exactly where you want their attention.

This guide sets out the format NZ employers expect, walks through each section, and finishes with a complete example CV you can copy and adapt. For more job-hunting guides, see our Jobs & Education section.

Quick answer: what an NZ CV includes

In order, a standard NZ CV contains:

1. Your name and contact details. Name as the heading, then phone, a professional email address, your town or city, and a LinkedIn profile link if you have one.
2. A personal statement. Three or four sentences covering who you are, your strongest relevant experience and what you are looking for.
3. Key skills. A short list matched to the job advertisement, each skill backed by a brief example or result.
4. Work history. Most recent job first, with your achievements in each role, not just your duties.
5. Education and qualifications. Most recent or most relevant first.
6. Referees. Either two or three named referees, or the line “Referees available on request”.

Optional extras, if relevant: licences and certificates (a full driver licence matters for many roles), languages, volunteer work, and interests that show something useful. Everything is tailored to the specific job. Tahatū, the government careers service, is blunt about this: update your CV for every application, using the wording of the job ad.

NZ CV format rules

NZ employers read a lot of CVs and skim most of them. The conventions below come from Tahatū and Careers NZ guidance, and they are mostly about making the skim easy.

Length. Keep it to two pages if you can. Three pages is acceptable for a long and relevant career, but it is a ceiling, not a target. If yours is longer, the fix is nearly always the same: cut old and irrelevant jobs down to a line each, and delete duties that every holder of that job title performs anyway.

Layout. One plain font throughout, black, at a readable size (Calibri 11 or similar). Bold headings, bullet points, short sentences, plenty of white space. No images, no photos, no text boxes, no tables, no fancy design templates. This is partly taste and partly practical: applicant tracking systems (ATS) struggle with graphics and multi-column layouts, and software may read your CV before a person does.

Order. Reverse chronological, always. Most recent job first, most recent or most relevant qualification first. A reader should be able to see what you do now within the first few lines.

File and filename. Send a PDF unless the employer asks for a Word document. Name the file with your name and the word CV, in the pattern Tahatū suggests: firstname-lastname-CV.pdf. “Document1.pdf” tells the employer nothing and gets lost in a downloads folder.

The cover letter. A CV in NZ travels with a cover letter unless the application system says otherwise. The letter is one page, addressed to a named person where you can find one, and rewritten for each job. It does the connecting work: why this organisation, why this role, and which points from your CV prove the match.

Section by section

Personal details

Your name goes at the top, large and clear. Under it: mobile number, email, town or city, and a LinkedIn URL if you keep one current. That is all an employer needs at this stage.

You do not need your full street address. Town or suburb and city are enough for an employer to know you are local or prepared to relocate. Leave off your date of birth, marital status, nationality and IRD number, and never put bank details on a CV. If you have recently arrived in New Zealand, one useful addition is a short line about your right to work, for example “NZ citizen” or “Holder of a Resident Visa, eligible to work in New Zealand”. Employers must check that applicants are legally entitled to work here, so answering that question up front removes a reason to pass you over.

Check the email address itself, too. Something built from your name reads professionally; an old joke address does not.

Personal statement (profile)

Three or four sentences, no more. Say what you do, how much experience you have, one or two strengths that matter for this job, and what you are looking for. Rewrite it for every application, because a statement that could be sent to anyone convinces no one.

Weak: “I am a hardworking, motivated team player seeking a challenging role in a progressive company.”

Better: “Customer service team leader with six years in retail and contact centre roles. I train new staff, handle escalated complaints and run the weekend roster for a team of nine. Now looking for a team leader role where I can take on coaching and reporting duties.”

The second version works because every claim in it can be checked against the work history below.

Key skills

Pull this list from the job advertisement. If the ad asks for complaint resolution, stock control and experience with a particular point-of-sale system, and you have those things, they are your first three skills, in the ad’s own wording where you honestly can.

A bare list is weak evidence. Careers NZ has long advised giving an example with each skill: what you did, where, and what happened. “Customer service: rated 95 percent or higher in mystery shopper checks across two years” beats “excellent customer service skills” every time. Six to eight skills is plenty, with the ones the employer asked for first.

Work history

For each role: job title, employer, location, and dates (month and year is fine). Then three to six bullet points. Lead with what you achieved or were responsible for, and put numbers on it where you can: team size, sales figures, call volumes, budget, deadlines met.

Duties that define the job title itself add little. A retail assistant does not need to say they served customers and operated a till. What a reader wants is evidence you did the job well: the promotion, the process you fixed, the target you beat.

Go back about ten years in detail. Older roles can shrink to a line each, and anything irrelevant to this application can come out. Handle gaps briefly and honestly, in the CV or the cover letter, rather than disguising them with vague dates.

Education and training

Qualification, provider, and year completed, most recent or most relevant first. Include licences and certificates the job needs: first aid, forklift, food safety, a driver licence class. Short courses belong here only if relevant. School results from a decade ago rarely are, unless you are a recent school leaver, in which case NCEA results and school roles carry real weight.

If your qualification is from overseas, give the NZQA-assessed equivalent if you have one. It saves the employer a step.

Referees

NZ employers usually want two or three referees: people who have managed you, taught you or worked alongside you and can talk about your work. You have two options, and both are standard practice here.

Name them on the CV, with their name, job title, organisation, phone number and email. Or write “Referees available on request” and hand the details over when you are shortlisted. Tahatū’s guidance is to follow the job ad: if it asks for referees, include them; if it does not, the “available on request” line is fine.

Three rules apply either way. Ask each referee first, every time. Tell them which job you have applied for, so the call is not a surprise. And check their contact details are current. Under the Privacy Act 2020 an employer should only collect information about you from people you have nominated, which is another reason to choose deliberately.

Family members and friends do not count. With no work history yet, a teacher, tutor, coach or volunteer coordinator who has seen you work is a legitimate referee.

The example CV template

Below is a complete NZ CV for a fictional applicant. Copy the structure, replace every line with your own information, and trim it to fit two pages.

Note: Aroha Bennett is a fictional example created for this template. Any resemblance to a real person’s details is coincidental.

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AROHA BENNETT
Wellington | 021 555 014 | aroha.bennett.example@gmail.com | linkedin.com/in/arohabennett-example

Personal statement
Customer service team leader with six years of experience across retail and contact centre work. I train and roster a team of nine, resolve escalated complaints, and consistently meet service targets in high-volume environments. Looking for a team leader role with responsibility for coaching and service reporting.

Key skills

• Complaint resolution: handled escalated customer complaints for a 40-seat contact centre, with 92 percent resolved at first contact across 2025.
• Team training: wrote the induction programme for new service staff and trained 14 new starters in two years.
• Rostering: built weekly rosters for a team of nine across seven-day opening hours, covering leave and peak periods.
• Systems: confident with Zendesk, Microsoft 365 and POS systems; accurate data entry at 65 words per minute.
• Stock and cash handling: daily till reconciliation and banking for a store turning over $35,000 a week.

Work history

Customer Service Team Leader, Harbour City Homewares, Wellington
March 2023 to present

• Lead a team of nine customer service and checkout staff in a store with $1.8 million in annual sales.
• Cut average complaint resolution time from three days to one by introducing a same-day callback system.
• Train all new starters and run monthly service coaching sessions.
• Store achieved a 96 percent score in the 2025 mystery shopper audit, up from 88 percent in 2023.

Customer Service Representative, Harbour City Homewares, Wellington
June 2021 to March 2023

• Answered 40 to 60 customer calls and emails a day about orders, deliveries and returns.
• Promoted to team leader after two years, following consistently top-quartile customer feedback scores.

Retail Assistant, Lambton Quay Books, Wellington
February 2020 to May 2021

• Served customers, processed sales and managed stock deliveries in a busy city store.
• Ran the school stationery ordering programme each January, coordinating 300 back-to-school orders.

Education and training

• Certificate in Business (First Line Management) Level 4, Open Polytechnic, 2024
• Comprehensive First Aid certificate, current
• Full Class 1 driver licence

Referees
Referees available on request.

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Chronological or skills-based: which format?

Tahatū offers two template styles, and the choice depends on your history, not your taste.

A work-focused (chronological) CV leads with work history and suits most people. Use it if you have a solid work record, are applying for a similar job to your current one, or are taking the next step in the same field. The example above is work-focused.

A skills-focused CV leads with a detailed skills section, an example under each skill, and keeps work history brief. Use it if you are a school leaver, have little paid work experience, are returning to work after time away, or are changing careers. It lets volunteer work, study, caregiving, sport and community roles supply the evidence a work history normally would.

Career changers sometimes blend the two: a strong skills section up top, then a normal work history. That hybrid is fine. What matters is that the evidence for the job you want sits in the first half of page one.

What not to include

• A photo. NZ guidance is consistent on this: no photo, no images at all.
• Date of birth or age. Not needed, and age is a prohibited ground of discrimination under the Human Rights Act 1993.
• Marital status, family details, religion, political views. Same reason. Irrelevant to the job and protected by law.
• Your full home address. Town or city only.
• Bank account details or your IRD number. These are collected later, through the employer’s onboarding paperwork, never on a CV.
• Salary history. Not an NZ convention. Pay is discussed at offer stage.
• Irrelevant or very old jobs in full detail. A line each, or cut them.
• Lies. Referees get called, qualifications get checked, and a false claim found later is grounds for dismissal. Embellishment is the fastest way to lose a job you could have won honestly.

Common mistakes

Sending the same CV everywhere. The most common fault, and the easiest to fix. Twenty minutes of tailoring, moving the asked-for skills to the top and echoing the ad’s wording, does more than any redesign.

Listing duties instead of results. “Responsible for customer complaints” describes a job. “Resolved 92 percent of escalated complaints at first contact” describes a person worth interviewing.

Burying the match. If the ad wants a forklift licence and you hold one, it should not hide in a paragraph on page two. Key requirements go in the skills list, near the top.

Careless errors. Spelling mistakes, a wrong phone number, a previous employer’s name left in the cover letter. Tahatū’s final check is worth copying: proofread carefully, then have someone else read it too.

Overdesigning. Columns, graphics, icons and coloured backgrounds look impressive on screen and fall apart in an ATS or a black-and-white printout. Boring formatting wins jobs.

Tailoring your CV for applicant tracking systems

Many larger NZ employers and recruitment agencies run applications through an applicant tracking system. Tahatū describes what these systems do: they search CVs and cover letters for keywords and rank applicants against the job. You do not need tricks to deal with them. You need alignment.

Read the advertisement closely and note the exact job title, the industry terms, the named skills, and any tools or software mentioned. Where those words truthfully describe your experience, use them in the same form. If the ad says “customer complaint resolution” and your CV says “sorting out unhappy customers”, the software may not connect the two, even though a human reader would.

Keep formatting simple and consistent: standard section headings, one column, no tables or text boxes, nothing important in headers or footers. Send the file type the employer asked for. And do not stuff keywords in unnaturally. The software is a filter, not the decision maker; a person still reads what gets through, and keyword stuffing is obvious to both.

Frequently asked questions

How long should a CV be in New Zealand?

Two pages is the goal, per Tahatū. Three is the practical maximum for a long, relevant career. If yours runs long, shorten older roles to one line each and cut anything that does not match the job.

Should I put referees on my CV or write “available on request”?

Both are accepted in NZ. Follow the advertisement: if it asks for referees, name two or three, with title, organisation and contact details. If it does not ask, “Referees available on request” is standard. Either way, ask your referees first and warn them the call may come.

Do I need a cover letter as well as a CV?

Usually, yes. Tahatū treats the cover letter as a standard part of an application: one page, addressed to a named person if you can find one, tailored to the role. Some application systems make it optional. If there is a place to add one, add one.

Should I include a photo on my NZ CV?

No. NZ careers guidance says to leave photos and images off entirely, and employers are barred from deciding based on appearance-related characteristics, so a photo can only muddy your application.

What file format should I send?

PDF, unless the employer or the application system asks for Word. Name the file with your first and last name plus CV, for example firstname-lastname-CV.pdf.

I have no work experience. What do I put on my CV?

Use a skills-focused format. Lead with skills, each backed by an example from school, study, sport, volunteering, family business work or community roles. Give your education more detail, and choose referees who have seen you work, such as a teacher, coach or volunteer coordinator.

Can I use an overseas CV format?

Start from it if you like, but convert it before applying. NZ employers expect something shorter, with no photo, no date of birth, no full address, and evidence written for the specific job. A four-page overseas format CV, sent unchanged, reads as unfamiliar with the local market.

Sources

• Tahatū (Tertiary Education Commission), “How to write a CV”: CV length, formatting, ATS keywords, skills-focused and work-focused templates, PDF and filename conventions. https://tahatu.govt.nz/work/applying-for-a-job/how-to-write-a-cv
• Tahatū, “How to write a cover letter”: one-page letters, tailoring, addressing a named person, PDF filename. https://tahatu.govt.nz/work/applying-for-a-job/how-to-write-a-cover-letter
• Careers NZ, CV checklist and CV example (workbook, api.careers.govt.nz): contact details on page one, font size 11 to 12, most recent jobs and highest qualifications first, remove images, photos, text boxes and tables, two to three pages maximum. https://api.careers.govt.nz/assets/Uploads/Making-your-Career-Kakala-Applying-for-jobs-CVs-cover-letters-and-more-Interactive-2022.pdf
• Employment New Zealand, “The hiring process”: employers must not unlawfully discriminate on prohibited grounds such as sex, marital or family status, age, or religious or ethical belief; Privacy Act 2020 limits on collecting applicant information; employers must check an applicant’s legal right to work in NZ. https://www.employment.govt.nz/starting-employment/hiring/the-hiring-process

General information only, based on the NZ sources above. Individual employers and industries vary; the job advertisement always wins where it differs from general guidance.