Communications Manager CV Examples & Writing Guide

This CV belongs to someone who owns internal communications for a multi-site employer and also handles media enquiries and crisis messaging. The person and organisations are invented. The metrics are ones you can pull out of your email platform, your intranet analytics and your town hall attendance reports.

Communications manager is one of the vaguest titles in any organisation. In one company it means running the intranet, in another it means press office, in a third it is basically content marketing. Hiring managers read your CV trying to work out which one you are. Help them.

• Which discipline you actually practise. Internal and employee communications, corporate and executive communications, media relations and public relations, or marketing communications. Say it in your first line, because the wrong assumption gets you screened out.
• Audience and scale. Employee headcount, number of sites or countries, subscriber counts, media list size, budget, team size. These are the numbers that place you at a level.
• Whether you have handled something hard. Redundancies, a recall, an outage, a leadership change, a regulatory issue, a strike or a merger. A person who has written a holding statement under time pressure is worth more than one who has only run a content calendar.
• Proof you can write. Communications hiring almost always includes a writing test. A CV that is itself well written and free of filler is the first sample they read.

“The CVs that get shortlisted tell me who the audience was and how big it was. Three thousand employees over forty sites is a different job from a two-hundred-person startup, even if the title matches. And I will read your CV as a writing sample whether you meant it that way or not.”

These four jobs share a title and almost nothing else. Match your CV to the one in the advert, and move the matching experience to the top of each role.

If you have done more than one, keep a base CV with all of it and cut it down for each application. A two-page CV that tries to prove you are equally strong at press office and employee engagement usually convinces nobody.

Communications people often say their work cannot be measured. Hiring managers disagree, and every platform you use reports numbers. Use the ones that show a change you caused, not vanity totals.

• Reach and engagement with a baseline: open rate from 38% to 67%, intranet weekly active users from 41% to 72% of staff, town hall attendance from 900 to 2,100.
• Speed: time to publish a leadership message, time to first statement in an incident, turnaround on media enquiries.
• Quality signals: post-event survey scores, message recall in a pulse survey, the share of employees who say they know what the strategy is.
• Media outcomes: enquiries handled, stories placed, outlets by tier, share of voice against named competitors, corrections avoided.
• Efficiency: approval steps removed, agency spend reduced, templates or a message library that cut repeat work.
• Reach beyond email: how many frontline or deskless workers you reached, and how. This is a live problem in healthcare, retail, manufacturing and logistics, and few candidates address it.

Most communications CVs list deliverables. Deliverables are not achievements. Add the audience, the number and the change.

Three or four lines. Discipline, years, audience size, one or two proof points, credential if you have one. Rewrite the first line for every application.

Almost every communications hire involves a writing test or a request for samples. Deal with it on the CV rather than waiting to be asked.

1. 1Prepare three samples that show range: a short executive message, a piece of hard news (a closure, an outage, a policy change), and something with a voice, such as a feature or a script.
2. 2Redact anything confidential. Replace company names, remove figures your employer treats as private, and say clearly that the sample has been anonymised. Nobody expects unpublished internal memos to be shared as they are.
3. 3Put a portfolio link on the CV if your work is public, or write "writing samples on request" if it is not. Internal communications people usually cannot publish, and that is understood.
4. 4Keep the CV itself clean. Filler phrases, mixed tenses and inconsistent capitalisation on a communications CV are read as evidence, not as typos.
5. 5If you are asked to complete a written exercise, follow the brief exactly, including word count. Hiring managers use it to test whether you can work to constraints.

Two pages once you have five or more years. Keep it single column and plain, and do not use a creative layout to prove you are creative. Communications roles sit in HR or corporate affairs, which are heavy users of applicant tracking software.

• Mirror the advert's own words: "internal communications", "employee engagement", "executive communications", "media relations", "change communications", "crisis communications", "stakeholder management".
• Name your platforms in full: SharePoint, Staffbase, Poppulo, Workvivo, Mailchimp, Cision, Meltwater, Sprout Social, Asana, Canva, Adobe InDesign. These are common screening filters.
• Write both the long and short form once: "public relations (PR)", "communications (comms)".
• Give each employer a one-line descriptor with sector and headcount. Communications scale is invisible without it.
• No photo, no date of birth, no marital status on a UK CV, no matter how brand-focused the role is.
• Send a PDF. Keep the file name plain: Lastname-Firstname-Communications-Manager-CV.pdf.