What makes a CV worth our time

We read several hundred CVs a week. The strongest ones do not look like CVs the recruitment industry has been training people to write for the last decade. They are not laden with adjectives. They are not a parade of synonyms for “delivered”. They do not have a “professional summary” paragraph that reads like a horoscope. And they are, generally, shorter.

The signals we look for are easy to describe but uncomfortable to apply. Each of them requires a candidate to be more specific, and more honest, than the default-recruitment-industry template encourages.

I - Specific scope, not synonyms for “delivered”

The single biggest signal is whether a candidate can describe the scope of their actual work in a sentence that the reader could not invent themselves. “Led the redesign of the order-management service” tells us nothing - we could write that for any senior engineer we have never met. “Took the order-management service from 6-hour batch reconciliation to under 90 seconds, while keeping the SQL Server layer in place because the trading desk could not move off it” tells us something specific, defensible and almost certainly true.

The fix is not “be more impressive”. The fix is to write one sentence per role that is so specific the reader cannot have generated it from a template. If the sentence sounds embarrassingly small, it is almost certainly more useful than the one that sounds large.

II - Honest tenure framing

Many strong candidates have a CV that reads worse than they are because they have not learned to frame tenure honestly. A 14-month role looks like a flight risk when it is listed flat. A 14-month role that is described as “hired to ship the cleared-environment rewrite of the platform; left at handover when the company restructured the engineering function” reads as someone who completed the job they were hired for.

If a tenure is short and there is a real reason, write it. If a tenure is short and there is not a real reason, the CV is the wrong place to disguise it - the conversation is.

III - A real “why this firm”

The CVs that survive our second read are the ones that show the candidate has made deliberate choices, not just opportunistic moves. Roles described in the same flat tone signal someone who was available; roles described with a one-line why I chose this place signal someone who was discerning.

This does not need to be on the CV itself - many candidates put it in the cover note. But somewhere in the application, we want to see the candidate has a model of why they joined the last firm, and what they learned about that model. If we cannot see it, we will ask in the first call. If the answer there is generic, that is the signal.

What we do not weight as heavily as you think

A surprising number of things candidates spend hours on do not change our read.

• CV design. A clean two-column Word template reads the same as a Figma masterpiece. Past a basic legibility bar, design effort is invisible.
• Headshot. We do not look at the photo, if there is one. The hiring firm will see your LinkedIn before the offer stage anyway.
• Buzzword density. “Drove cross-functional initiatives at scale” lands the same as “increased cross-functional throughput at scale”. The buzzword density signals nothing we can use.
• The professional summary paragraph. We almost never read it. Use the space for one specific sentence per role instead.

The CV exists to get you the conversation. If yours is doing that, it is working - whatever it looks like. If yours is not, the fix is almost always more specificity, not more polish. A sharp one-page CV with three real, defensible sentences will move further with us than a four-page CV with thirty unfalsifiable ones.

We have written separately about what happens once you send us a CV - see what happens to your CV for the operational detail.