I moved to Dublin from Turkey, and after than I had chance to refer some friends to companies I worked, or helped some people want to move into countries in Europe by finding an IT job. This is mostly relevant for guys with some experience.

Here is my take on how your CV should be prepared if you want to move to Ireland by finding a sponsor to your working Visa. I actually wrote this as a checklist for some of my friends after seeing some common very basic mistakes in a couple of CVs.

People won't read your CV, but they will scan

People looking to hire people are usually busy and they don't have time carefully read your CV. Nobody reads CVs in detail, they just scan your CV, and scan fast. You usually have ~30 seconds to influence them to call you for the interview.

People evaluating your CV, have a role in their mind and trying to find if you are a good match for it. And the most useful way for this is trying to match keywords. Keywords are relatively easy to scan. Keyword can be a particular technology name, a methodology followed or a popular buzzword. So spread them into your CV properly. Mentioning keywords under the experience section could do the job well. People will stop scanning and check around it when they see a matching keyword to see if that is a real match. This is when most people actually read your CV. You can help people to scan your CV by making some words bold to draw their attention.

You have to make your CV extremely easy to scan, they should see keywords or particular phrases immediately. Try putting emphasis on some keywords or challenges you faced by making some words bold. Or you can also put your own challenges as your own projects (e.g. Built CI/CD Pipeline, Implemented Continuous Deployment Automation, Created Monitoring And Logging Dashboards). This could also make the reviewers life a lot easier.

People will expect to see your most fresh knowledge or experience first

They will expect to see your recent experience and up-to-date status of knowledge first. So move your recent hot topics to the top as much as you can. They can be in any form,as a career summary, as your experiences, a keyword list or your areas of interest. I suggest to put a career summary since this is your chance to tell about your profession and experience in relation to your job target.

As people progress into the following pages, they think the content will start to get less relevant to your recent expertise. And whatever written after the second page could simply be ignored as your "archaic"experience. I'm not saying that your CV has to be a few pages, but be careful about what you put into first few pages.

Putting your full address, education, personal details like nationality, date of birth, languages you know into very top of your CV is not a good idea. Most details other than your name and contact info will just distract people from understanding your experience. If you really want to put that kind of less relevant information, move them to end of the CV.

First barrier: Passing HR review

Your CV must survive 2 main levels of review. First level is HR, and if not eliminated, then it can progress to next level, technical people. Unless you never apply without a referral, you have to understand how HR works. Here are some techniques I guess HR are using.

Since HR has lower level of understanding what you do, they more often depend on matching keywords and estimating your experience level based on written experience.

There is a significant importance about putting as many keywords as you can into your CV because
some companies and recruiters uses automatic CV scanning softwares which are highly depending on keyword matching. Or recruiters sometimes use queries like this one (try to paste it into linkedin search box):
docker AND (mesos OR marathon OR kubernetes OR k8s) AND (ansible OR chef OR puppet OR salt OR saltstack) AND (python OR ruby OR perl OR golang OR nodejs) AND bash AND (c OR c++ OR java OR scala) AND (nfs OR glusterfs OR ceph) AND (gitlab OR gocd OR rundeck OR bamboo OR jenkins)

Second barrier: Passing technical guy review

Put what "you" did, not what your team did. And use an achiever language rather then a doer language.

It is more relevant to put your achievements, contributions and the differences you made in a project; rather than tasks assigned to you, your daily duties or what your team delivered. So while writing your experiences try to impress the reader and try to create excitement while people are reading your CV. Try not to tell the project or it's importance, instead tell how exactly you contributed or which parts did you own and how did you make a success story out of it.

You should also mention the technologies and techniques you used in your projects. This gives hint about your expertise. E.g. HyperV, VMWare, XEN or KVM, all could be called as virtualization, but if you don't mention the technology, you can't know what will the reader understand.

Less relevant information last

If not so relevant to your recent career you should move your education below your experience section.If someone really want to see what you studied they'll likely look for it, but this could highly triggered by your experiences. What you studied is relatively less important if you are not a new grad.

In development and DevOps, people usually don't care about your nationality, which languages you know (and levels for each), your age, your interests. You can completely drop them or move to bottom of your CV.

Similar for the courses, seminars, certificates, references. Place them to bottom.

Your name is the title of the paper

And try to put your name big and clear on top. So if someone is searching for your CV in a pile, they can find your CV fast. This also makes people to remember your name. Don't write it in small fonts as a regular text. It's more like the title of the book, not a text with emphasis.