The #1 Reason Most of My Clients Don’t Get Enough Interviews: Their Resume

Tod had been applying for two months. Nothing came back. Not rejections, just silence, the kind that makes you quietly start editing yourself out of roles before you even apply.

We rewrote his CV on a Tuesday. A recruiter called him the next day.

Nothing about Tod's experience changed overnight. What changed was whether he showed up at all. Because before a human reads your CV, someone goes looking for it first, and most strong candidates are invisible to that search.

You're not being rejected. You're not surfacing.

After a few weeks of silence, most people land on one of two explanations. A robot auto-rejected them. Or they just weren't good enough. Both are usually wrong, and both keep you fixing the wrong thing.

Here's what actually happens. A recruiter opens a system holding hundreds of applications and runs a search. A job title. A few must-have terms the hiring manager named on the intake call, the call where the recruiter and hiring manager decide who they're looking for. They work the matches from the top, and they rarely reach the rest. You weren't rejected. You were never in the set they looked at.

The "ATS score" people lose sleep over is mostly a myth. There are dozens of these systems and none of them hand a recruiter a clean pass-or-fail number. The filter that decides your fate is a human running a keyword search and trusting it. If your CV doesn't carry the words they search for, in the places they look, you don't come up. No keyword, no shortlist, however good you are.

So the goal isn't to beat a machine. It's to be findable by a tired person in a hurry, then convincing in the few seconds after they find you.

Good CV, bad CV: the same career, two outcomes

I see the same gap every week. Two people with similar experience, one gets called, one doesn't. The difference is almost never talent. It's legibility.

The header. A bad one carries a photo, a date of birth, an age, a personal site that died in 2019. A good one is your name, your contact, your LinkedIn, and a relevant link like GitHub. Nothing a recruiter has to wade through to reach the point.

The summary. A bad one says "hardworking, dedicated professional passionate about technology," which tells a recruiter nothing and burns your most-read three lines. A good one places you instantly: your level, your domain, the kind of company you've done it for.

The skills. A bad one lists every tool you have ever opened, twenty-plus deep, including the dead ones. It reads as junior. A good one shows the stack this role asks for and the things you could be grilled on in an interview, and stops there.

The experience. A bad one is a list of duties stuffed with buzzwords. A good one shows what changed because you were there: the context, what you did, the result, and the stack. Quantify where you can. Where you genuinely can't, say who relied on it or what broke without it.

If you want the deep version of how to write each of these, I broke it down in Why most resumes suck and how to fix yours.

How much should you tailor?

Less than you think, and more precisely than you think.

You don't rewrite the whole CV for every role. A clear, strong CV gets reused. What you change is the top third and the keywords: the exact title and the few terms that repeat in the job ad, moved into your first lines and your most relevant bullets, in the words they used. Not paraphrased.

You only do a real rewrite when you change job family. A data engineer moving toward product needs a genuinely different CV, because the search terms and the signals are different. Same person, different shortlist, different words.

Silence after applying feels like a verdict on you. It almost never is. It's usually just a search you didn't come up in, and that is a far more fixable problem than the one you have been quietly assuming.

If you want a recruiter's eyes on yours, I review and rewrite CVs so they surface and convince, or you can build your own from the templates and field handbook I give my clients, made for ANZ tech roles.

FAQ

Does an ATS automatically reject my CV?

Mostly no. The "ATS score" is a myth. What filters you is a recruiter running a keyword search inside the system and only working the matches. The fix isn't beating a robot, it's carrying the words they search for, where they look.

What keywords should I put on my CV?

The exact job title and the three or four must-have terms that repeat in the ad, in the words they used. Put them in your top third and your most relevant bullets. Not paraphrased.

How much should I tailor my CV for each job?

Tailor the top third and the keywords, not the whole document. Do a full rewrite only when you change job family, where the signals and search terms genuinely differ.

Why am I getting no response even though I'm qualified?

Usually because you're not surfacing in the recruiter's search, not because you're underqualified. Your experience may be there but sitting below the terms and the level they scan for first.