Director
We’ve talked to many candidates recently who say they’ve applied for lots of jobs on LinkedIn and elsewhere but hear nothing back. They suspect they are being automatically rejected by an AI CV screener. Candidates ask us how to “code” a CV to get past this.
The first thing to note is that if AI is reviewing and rejecting you, you’re likely to get the same result with a human CV reviewer.
We see lots of basic CV mistakes/improvements that could be made that would increase the chances of being seriously reviewed and assessed against a job role that matches your experience. This happens at all levels and candidates seem to have blind spots with their CVs. I’ll try to give some guidance on this below but first of all, you should follow our CV advice blog to get the structure, use of keywords and layout right.
Who is looking at my CV?
You never know who will look at your resume and make the decision to progress or reject your application, but the likelihood is that it won’t be the line manager and it probably won’t be someone with a deep understanding of your role and expertise.
In the current market, there are usually hundreds of applications for each role and talent teams are stretched thinly. Sometimes it’s a junior or less-experienced person giving the first review, and they’ll make a judgement to reject or continue reading within 3 seconds.
Advice on how to improve your CV
The main problem that we see, time and again, at all levels, is the relevance of a CV to the role. Note I say CV and not your experience, because it is just your CV that’s being considered at this point and not your experience – does the CV match? Candidates often feel that their experience aligns well, but if you take a close look at their CV, it fails to clearly articulate what their employer does, what they’ve done and doesn’t actually align to the requirements of the role.
The importance of keywords on your CV
When reviewing your resume, the AI reviewer (or human) will be looking for the actual words that match the job description. B2B or B2C; product/tech domain; market sector; micro, SMB or enterprise customers; length of sales cycle; pre or post product market fit; local, regional or global; team size of 3 or 30; etc (I’ve tried to give general examples that apply to different job categories).
Common CV mistakes
Lack of detail about your employers
You state your employer name and assume everyone knows what they do. It increases the review time for someone to look up your employer. Write a few words or one line stating their product/service – eg ‘global cyber security software vendor’ or ‘UK sports nutrition ecommerce scale-up’
Lack of detail about achievements
You don’t actually describe what you’ve done – scope of activities, what you’ve built, team size managed. You may assume that 0 to 1 involves finding product-market fit, mention both. You may think it’s obvious that being CMO for a scaling tech business involves content marketing, write the words.
No impact statements
IMPACTS, IMPACTS and more IMPACTS. This isn’t about relevance, but is a common problem. Don’t just describe the scope of your work and responsibilities, also list the impact of your work (with numbers). For example: “I did x which drove revenue by y”.
What have you done that has delivered commercial value:
- increased sales
- acquired more customers
- reduced churn
- increased LTV or basket size
- improved customer satisfaction
- reduced CPA
- reduced costs
Lack of clear formatting
Different roles with one company that makes you look like you change jobs frequently. Format your resume so that the time with each employer is VERY clear, as opposed to making them look like different jobs, when reviewed for 3 seconds.
Non-tailored applications
The curse of LinkedIn Quick Apply is that people are applying for too many roles with a generic CV as opposed to a tailored CV. It should be clear from an advert what experience is essential. If you have this experience, it would take 2-3 minutes to ensure that it’s mentioned (and amplified) in your resume. It’s better to make fewer higher quality applications, where you highlight key experience (that you genuinely have) for each application.
Most human reviewers look straight at your recent work history (most recent role) and look for relevance to the role applied for. It is critical that you say more about recent positions than roles earlier in your career.
Errors included
You’d be surprised…. I always advise candidates to have someone else review their core resume before using it. Incentivise them with a cup of tea if they find an error.
Summary
In summary, it sounds obvious, but people are rejected because their CV is not relevant (or importantly, doesn’t appear to be relevant within 3 seconds of review by someone who may be inexperienced), which isn’t to say that your experience isn’t relevant. Have someone who doesn’t work in your industry look at your resume and tell you if they can explain what you and the company you work for does. And for individual applications, make sure your CV actually mentions the experience that’s listed in the advert.
You can find more advice on CV preparation, using your network to find opportunities, preparing for interviews and how to perform well in interviews in this Product Voice podcast, called ‘How to stand out in the job market.’
