Why doesn't my CV get me to the interview?

Your CV has one job, and it is not getting you the job. It opens a door, nothing more and nothing less. Most CVs fail at that door not because the person is unqualified, but because whoever reads it does not know the field well enough to work out that they are.

And that reader is a generalist far more often than candidates imagine.

What is your CV actually for?

A CV buys you a conversation. That is the entire return on it. The interview is where you get hired, so everything the document needs to do is get you into the room where that happens.

This sounds like a small ambition. It is actually the hardest stage in the process, because it is the only one where you are assessed with no opportunity to explain yourself.

How long do we actually spend on it?

Ten to fifteen seconds, in my experience. That is the first pass. If something catches my eye I will invest more time and try to understand the detail properly, but that extra time has to be earned inside the first ten.

In that window we are reading three things: the job titles, the keywords, and the profile description at the top. Not the fourth bullet of your third role. The top third of page one is doing almost all of the work.

Who is actually reading it?

Here is the part candidates rarely consider. Plenty of internal recruiters are genuinely technical, but many of us are HR or generalist recruiters hiring across niches we have never worked in ourselves.

That produces inconsistency. Right candidates get missed, not from carelessness but from a translation gap. So we truly need your help. Tell us within ten seconds why you are relevant, because some of us are not equipped to work it out alone.

Let's face it: if you decide that figuring it out is our job, you are betting against your own odds. Application volume is high and not all of us have the physical capacity to review every CV properly. Some of us simply do it better than others.

Where I got this wrong

Early on I was hiring back-end developers with no development background of my own. I skipped every CV that said full stack, or engineer, or anything that was not the exact job title written on the brief. I thought I was being precise.

I was filtering out people who could obviously do the work. Titles vary enormously between companies, and once I understood how databases and both stacks relate to each other, the same CVs read completely differently. Nothing on those documents had changed. My ability to read them had.

Screening in a niche you do not know is like ordering dinner abroad from a menu with no translation. You point at the two dishes whose names you recognise, and you never find out what you missed.

So why does everyone assume it was the ATS?

When a rejection arrives quickly, candidates assume a machine produced it. An ATS score, an AI filter, or a human who misread them.

Sometimes that is exactly what happened. But more often than not, the CV made far more sense to the person who wrote it than to anybody else. You know what you did in that role. The document only implies it.

The stranger test

Hand your CV to someone outside your field. Hand them the job title and the job description as well. Then ask one question: can you tell me whether this person is relevant for this role?

If they cannot, you do not have a bad career. You have a CV that requires expertise to decode, and the first person reading it may not have that expertise.

In our industry the best CV does not always belong to the best candidate. It belongs to whoever did the unglamorous work of being obvious. That is a separate skill from the one on the job description, and it is the one being tested first.