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Practical guide
A recruiter hiring a cadre looks for your scope, your results and the way you lead a team. How to write all three with your own figures, plus the profile, length and confidentiality.
A recruiter looking for a cadre (the French status for managers and senior professionals) reads your CV with three questions in mind: what were you responsible for, what changed because of you, and how do you lead the people who work with you. The answers come through figures: team size, budget, scope, results. They are yours, never rounded in your favour or made up. Being a cadre does not mean managing people, by the way: an expert with no team can have the same status, and has the same need to show their scope (the status itself is explained in our guide to cadre pay).
Under each job, a scope line first (“Operations Director, [X] sites, [X] staff, budget of [X]”), then achievements that start with a verb and end with a result. The general method, with the formula and where to dig up your figures, is in our guide to raising your CV's value; here is what changes for a cadre:
| Before | After |
|---|---|
| Management of a sales team | Led a team of [X] sales reps across the western region; revenue grown from [X] to [X] in [X] years |
| Managing transformation projects | Led the overhaul of invoicing in [X] countries for [X] users, delivered on budget |
| Monitoring purchasing and suppliers | Renegotiated the supplier portfolio ([X] in annual spend) and reduced the number of active suppliers |
Each “[X]” is waiting for your figure. That is the site's rule: its AI never puts a figure into your CV that your CV does not contain, and writes “[X]” instead. If an important figure is not in your CV yet, write it in “Your context” before the analysis or the rewrite: it then becomes usable. And when something is missing, the AI-improved CV asks you a few short questions before writing.
“Caring manager”, “inspiring leader”: these adjectives prove nothing and appear on every CV. Show actions instead: the people you hired and onboarded, the ones you helped grow or get promoted, a struggling team you turned round, a restructuring you carried out, a conflict you resolved. Distinguish direct management (people who report to you) from cross-functional leadership (people you coordinate without line authority): both count, but they are not the same job. The “leading, managing” verbs in our list of action verbs are made for these lines.
Under your name, the title of the role you are after, then two or three lines: your field, your usual scope, and what you do better than others. For example: “Chief Financial Officer, manufacturing. Building finance functions in growing companies, fundraising, cash management.” The title matters to the robots too: “The CV title is compared with the job ad title: it must clearly name the role you want.” The full method is in our guide to CV headlines and profiles.
An experienced cadre can run to two pages; our “Right length” criterion sums it up: “One to two pages depending on experience: the essentials must fit on the first.” The first page carries the headline, the profile and your recent jobs in detail; older jobs take one line each; education shrinks to the degree and the school, except for a recent executive programme. If you can fit on one page, do: our guide to one-page CVs says what to cut, and the one on CVs after 50 how to condense a long career.
Salary has no place on the CV, but it comes up quickly, along with the status, theforfait jours (days-based working time) and the variable pay. Our guide to cadre pay explains what the status changes between gross and net, and the gross ↔ net converter does the sum for a cadre and a non-cadre alike. To find out what your profile is worth, upload your CV to What am I worth?: the AI reads your job, experience and city, and the site works out your market value from INSEE salary data.
Recruitment firms and large groups also screen cadre applications with software. Reuse the exact title from the job ad when it matches your profile (“Directeur des achats” or “Head of Procurement”), name the tools and methods you master, and keep the layout simple. The ATS CV check tells you what is holding you back, criterion by criterion.
No. Pay is discussed at interview, once the employer knows what you bring. Instead, prepare your range from market data, as gross annual pay, with fixed and variable pay kept separate.
Rarely to any benefit. If you have publications, talks or a long list of consulting assignments, put them in a separate appendix to send when asked, and keep the CV itself to two pages at most.
Through cross-functional leadership: the number of people or teams you coordinated, the decisions you got made, the projects you ran without line authority. “Coordinated [X] teams across several departments to…” shows your influence better than a title.
Give orders of magnitude, trends or rankings rather than exact values, and describe a client without naming them. Also check what your contract says: a confidentiality clause may cover specific information.
The site's tools and features that go with this guide: the figures there are calculated by the code, never by the AI.