Nobody Is Telling You This But Your CV Is The Reason They Are Not Calling

Michael did not think he had a CV problem.

He thought he had a market problem.

That is what he told himself after the first two months. The market is tough right now. Everyone is saying so. It is not just me. He would read articles about hiring freezes and economic uncertainty and nod along because it made the silence easier to explain.

By month four, he was less sure. By month six, he came to see me.

Michael Had Spent Eight Years Building Something Real

He was a civil engineer. Not the kind who sits behind a desk reviewing other people’s drawings. The kind who is on site at six in the morning, walking the ground, making decisions, solving the problems that do not show up in any project plan but show up anyway because they always do

Eight years of that. Eight years of showing up and delivering.

And six months of nothing.

He Handed Me His CV Like It Was Fine

Because he genuinely thought it was.

Michael was an engineer. He was precise and methodical, and he had applied that same precision to his CV. Everything was accurate. Every date was correct. Every project was listed. He had even organised it chronologically and made sure the formatting was consistent throughout.

It was a very well-organised document that told me almost nothing about him.

The structural issue he caught, the one that saved the client months of delays and a great deal of money, was listed as “conducted routine site inspections and flagged technical concerns.”

He had potentially saved an entire project from collapse, and his CV made it sound like he had filled in a checklist.

I looked up at him. Did you use ChatGPT for this?

“Michael, do you know what you actually did on that site inspection?”

He told me everything he put in his prompt, then everything he actually did in his work, in detail and said he did not put all that on his CV because he did not want to exaggerate.

That Word. Exaggerate.

I hear it more than almost anything else in my line of work.

Professionals who have done genuinely impressive things are holding back on paper because they do not want to seem like they are overstating. They write the cautious version; the one AI has diluted to make them seem so average. We sat down, wrote his CV afresh and in just three weeks, Michael came back to my office with the good news of three job offers.

Takeaway           

If you have been telling yourself it is the market, I understand why. It is a comfortable explanation. It removes the pressure from you and places it somewhere outside your control.

But before you send out the next application, I want you to do one thing.

Read your CV and ask yourself honestly. Does this document show what I actually did, or does it show a quieter, safer version of it?

Click here to get started. Your career deserves to be told properly, and AI won’t do your career journey any justice.