What Does Your CV Actually Say When You Are Not In The Room

For eight months, David sent out applications on Sunday evenings and checked his email on Monday mornings, almost like a broken record, he kept on checking even when the rejection emails became overwhelming.

He was a project coordinator with four years of experience, not glamorous experience, but solid, the kind where you learn how things actually work rather than how they are supposed to work. He had kept a construction project on schedule through a contractor dispute that had stalled three other projects in the same period.  All these looked good on paper, so it came as a shock to him when he kept getting rejections.

By month eight, he had two first-round interviews and nothing else.

The Talk that changed everything

When he showed me his CV, I asked him one question. Did you write this yourself? He looked proud of himself and smirked when answering.

He had used an AI tool, he told me, because a friend had said it would make him sound more senior and of course, more professional.  Which it did, I will admit, but that kind of professional language is what tells the recruiter everything they need to know.

The AI had taken four years and produced something that sounded senior, the way a costume sounds formal.

The words were right, but nothing underneath them was real. The contractor dispute was not there. The budget management had no numbers attached to it. The site manager he had won over was not mentioned at all because David had not thought it was the kind of thing you put in a CV.

But he was wrong; it was exactly the kind of thing you put in a CV.

We rewrote it around the things he had been leaving out. Four weeks later, he had three interviews in one week. One hiring manager told him his application stood out because it was specific.

Specific, exactly what hiring managers are looking for. That was all it took. Just the true version instead of the tidy one.

Finally

Four years of real work deserve more than two interviews in eight months. If your CV is not opening the doors your experience should be opening then we can fix that. Click here today and let us write something that actually sounds like you.