Reformatting CVs to your own template: what it costs a desk

The number, and what is wrong with it #

A survey of more than 50 UK agencies by FormaCV, reported in Onrec on 1 July 2026, found that turning a candidate's CV into a client ready document takes 15 to 45 minutes, and that a consultant handling 40 a month loses roughly 20 hours to it.

Two caveats before anyone quotes that in a board meeting. It was commissioned by a supplier of CV formatting software and placed in the trade press, which is a reason to be careful rather than a reason to dismiss it.

The recruiters quoted in the same piece are more useful than the average. One said that "most weeks, making a CV client-ready takes me longer than the interview itself", and that it is "the part of the job I would hand off in a heartbeat". Another described the whole exercise flatly.

Why the house template exists #

It is worth being clear that reformatting is not vanity. There are three commercial reasons for it and they are all defensible.

• Protecting the introduction

  Contact details come out because an agency that sends a client a document with a phone number on it has handed over its fee.

• Making candidates comparable

  A hiring manager reading six CVs in six layouts is spending attention on design. A single layout puts the same information in the same place every time.

• The pitch

  The summary paragraph at the front, written by the consultant who has actually spoken to the person, is the bit a client cannot get from a job board.

Notice that the first two are mechanical and the third is not. That split runs through the whole of this page.

What the mechanical half actually consists of #

Watch somebody do it and the work is remarkably consistent.

None of that requires knowing anything about the candidate or the client. It is the same set of operations on every document, triggered the same way, producing the same kind of output. That is the definition of rule-shaped work, which is the test set out in what agency admin genuinely runs on rules.

What the editorial half consists of #

The other half is judgement, and it is not a small residue. Deciding what to lead with for this client. Cutting three roles from fifteen years ago without losing the thread. Deciding whether to explain a nine month gap in the summary or leave it for the interview. Deciding how much to say about a short tenure. Writing two sentences that make a hiring manager read the next page.

A consultant who knows the client does this quickly and well. Nobody else can do it at all, which is why the honest version of this page cannot tell you the whole job is waste.

The split, job by job #

The failure mode nobody plans for #

Every mechanical step above sits between the candidate's own account of their career and what the client reads. A parsing error that moves an end date by a year, or drops a qualification, or attaches a responsibility to the wrong employer, is not a formatting problem.

It is a factual change to a document you are sending on somebody's behalf, and it sits awkwardly next to regulation 19 of the Conduct Regulations, which requires an employment business to obtain confirmation that a work-seeker has the experience, training and qualifications the role needs before supplying them.

That is an argument for a check at the end, not an argument against ever touching the mechanical half. It is also the reason the related question, what automated CV screening gets wrong, deserves its own page.

Working out your own number #

Do not take 20 hours a month from a vendor survey and put it in a business case. Count your own: how many CVs go out a month, how long the mechanical half takes on a bad one rather than a good one, and what that time would otherwise have been spent on.

The free tools are built to do that arithmetic without asking you for an email address, and the free audit does it properly across the whole desk rather than one task.