A Good News Story – How a New CV Methodology Made a Massive Difference

By Matt Craven, Founder and Career Expert at The CV & Interview Advisors

Once Upon a Time

We are currently working on a career transition programme for a large company in London that is making significant redundancies. As part of this programme, we are delivering dozens of workshops on career planning, CV writing, LinkedIn, navigating the job market and interview techniques.

In these sessions, we meet lots of talented people who are suddenly forced to embrace a very competitive and digital job market. It’s tough for those affected, but we love being able to make a real difference to people’s lives, and it’s also an opportunity for us to speak to job seekers about their experiences to assess and validate what’s working and what isn't.

Our Hero

One particular person stood out – a relatively senior CSR professional, but with a varied career that is hard to tie down to an obvious future career path. They’ve had a successful career, are well paid, but find themselves a little lost.

I’ve personally spent a bit of ad-hoc 1-2-1 time with them to try and unravel their career and suggest potential roles. This provided some clarity, but nevertheless, they’ve been applying for roles and getting nowhere; literally sending their CV into a seemingly big black hole of nothingness.

The Happy Ending

Fast forward two weeks, during the latest workshop that I delivered, I had a chat with them, and they shared some good news. It went something like this…

“I spent two days rewriting my CV as you suggested, and the first job I applied for, I have got an interview. It’s a great opportunity (that may require a fair bit of travel and commitment), but it could be a great career move for me”.

They went on to say…

“After I had written my new CV, I compared it to what I had been sending out and I really noticed the difference – in fact, I’m almost a bit embarrassed with the low quality approach I had been taking. It’s taken these workshops for me to realise what a well-written, modern-day CV looks like”.

The Moral of The Story

What a great success story, and it warms me that our advice really does work for people. This is why I believe the new CV really made a difference:

You see, the problem right now is that many CVs are identical – job seekers are using artificial intelligence such as ChatGPT to write their CV for specific jobs, and employers are receiving hundreds of identikit CVs that all look like a good match for the role.

The problem is, they all read the same, they are written like a US resume, they are obviously written by AI, and they contain no evidence that the job seeker has the experience they are claiming to have.

Our CV methodology recommends this three-stage approach…

1. Reverse engineer the job advert to identify the key requirements of the role

2. Rebuild your CV around the job title, job mission, and key requirements

3. Back everything up with evidence using real-life examples and even mini case studies

It’s a bit more complicated than that, but this is the crux of it, and this is the approach that our hero used. So far, they have a 100% hit rate.

The takeaway here is that packing your CV full of real-life examples will make a big difference. Case studies are your friend. Use a methodology that allows you to home-in on the job mission and key requirements – literally tick off all their requirements by the bottom of page one.

The Sequel

Over the last few months, I’ve been keeping an eye on how AI is affecting the job market. Some of our previous newsletters have touched on this, but I’m giving it six months at most before we see some serious pushback on AI-written CVs (even more than we are seeing now).

Either employers will follow Anthropic’s lead and ban AI-generated content (happened recently), or they’ll implement AI-detection software. Just yesterday, I was playing around with some software that integrates with applicant tracking systems (ATS) and, in bulk, analyses CVs and scores them based on how much AI-generated content they contain.

They are selling this software to recruiters and employers with a view to weeding out AI-generated applications.

Oh, and by the way, I’m a big fan of AI, but it’s simply not working for job seekers right now, and it’s causing massive issues for both employers and job seekers alike.

So, watch this space – I’ll keep you posted with more updates in due course.