Ten pages of publications, rewritten into a two page CV
Paste your academic CV. See what every grant, course and lab role becomes when a hiring manager, not a committee, reads it.
Why a strong academic CV fails the first screen
An academic CV is an archive. It lists everything you have done, in order, and trusts the reader to judge. A hiring manager is not a committee. They decide in well under a minute whether to open your file properly, and they are hunting for one thing: proof you have already solved a problem that looks like theirs. Anything that does not serve that question is costing you the page.
The content is almost never the problem. Six years of running experiments on a fixed budget with shifting deadlines and a supervisor who changed the brief twice is exactly what a data, product or operations team is short of. The packaging is the problem. Grant numbers, course codes, conference abbreviations and a publication list that opens on page one all say "staying in academia" before a single sentence gets read.
There is also a machine in the way. Most employers parse your file before a person sees it, and academic templates break parsers badly: two column layouts, your name buried in a page header, teaching records held in tables, section titles like "Selected Presentations" that map to nothing. Fix the structure first, then make your case. HRLens does both passes in one upload.
Built for people leaving the lab
Read in seconds, not weeks
Upload the long version. You get a section by section verdict and a fix list, not a vague score out of ten.
Formatted for the parser
Standard headings, readable dates, one column. The layout survives upload instead of arriving as scrambled text.
One version per job ad
Point the builder at a posting and the same research history comes back aimed at that specific team.
What each academic credential turns into
The publication list becomes two lines
Papers, posters and invited talks collapse into a count and a profile link. Your record still stands, it just stops eating the page.
Grants become budget ownership
You wrote the proposal, won the money, reported against it. That is a funded business case, delivered on a deadline.
Supervision becomes people management
Students you trained, timelines you held, work you reviewed and sent back. Hiring managers read that as leading a team.
Methods become a skills block
Python, R, SQL, chromatography, statistical modelling. Named in the words the job ad uses, in a section a scanner can find.
Teaching becomes stakeholder communication
You explained hard material to a room of people every week and were scored on how well it landed. Say it that way.
Line by line
Same career, two different readers
| On your academic CV | What the committee reads | What the hiring manager needs to see |
|---|---|---|
| Publication list, six pages | Standing in the field | One line with the count, plus a link to your profile |
| Grant awarded as principal investigator | Funding record | Won a multi-year budget and reported on how it was spent |
| Supervised four doctoral students | Training the next cohort | Managed and developed a team across long projects |
| Two courses taught per semester | Teaching load | Ran weekly sessions for 200 people and was rated on them |
| Lab manager, departmental service | Good academic citizenship | Owned procurement, safety compliance and a shared budget |
| Methods: qPCR, Python, mixed models | Technical competence | Skills section matching the tools the posting actually lists |
Find out how your CV reads outside academia
Upload the version you have now. You will get the ATS check, the cuts to make and the lines worth rewriting.
Questions researchers ask us
Should I keep my publication list on an industry CV?
Not in full. Give the total count, note first-author papers if the number is strong, and link to your Google Scholar or ORCID profile. R&D and scientist roles may warrant three or four selected papers. For product, data, consulting or operations jobs, one line is plenty and the space is better spent on results.
How long should a PhD's industry CV be?
Two pages, and one page is fine early on. Length signals which world you come from before anyone reads a word, so a ten page document quietly announces that you have not adjusted. Keep the doctorate, the last two or three roles and the skills that match the posting. Everything else lives on your profile.
Will an ATS read my academic CV correctly?
Often not. Two column templates, names placed in page headers, teaching records inside tables and headings like "Selected Presentations" all confuse parsers, so your experience arrives out of order or missing. Run the file through a check before you apply. HRLens shows you exactly which sections came through intact and which broke.
What goes in my experience section if I have never worked in industry?
Your PhD and postdoc are jobs. List them with a title, an institution and dates, then write bullets about outcomes: budgets managed, people trained, tools built, results delivered, deadlines met. Drop the theory. A hiring manager wants the work you did, not the research question you did it under.
Should I still write PhD after my name?
Yes, put it beside your name or in the education section, and let it sit there quietly. What you should drop is the habit that comes with it: hedged phrasing, passive constructions and three clauses of context before the point. Write "cut sample processing time by half", not "was involved in efforts to improve throughput".