Why your CV isn't getting callbacks, and what to fix

You are qualified, you are applying, and nothing is coming back. It is demoralising, and it is rarely because you are not good enough. It is almost always one of a few fixable reasons your CV is not surviving the first cut.

Here is how to work out which one is yours.

1. It is not tailored to the job

The single biggest cause. A general CV that reads the same for every role does not match any of them well. The filtering software scores it low on relevance, and the recruiter cannot see why you fit fast enough to care.

Fix: match your headline, top bullets, and skills to each posting. See how to tailor your CV for the exact method.

2. The software rejected it before a human looked

Most companies filter CVs with an applicant tracking system first. Layouts it cannot read (tables, columns, text inside images, headers and footers) come out as garbled text and get scored as if half your experience is missing.

Fix: use a clean, single-column layout with real text and standard section headings. If you are not sure what breaks parsing, read ATS explained.

3. Your bullets describe duties, not results

"Responsible for managing the team" tells a reader nothing. Every candidate was responsible for their job. What separates you is what changed because you were there.

Fix: rewrite bullets to lead with a strong verb and, where you can, a result. "Cut onboarding time from three weeks to five days" beats "handled onboarding" every time. Do not invent numbers, but surface the ones that exist.

4. Your summary is generic

"Hard-working professional seeking new opportunities" is invisible. It could belong to anyone, so it makes you no one.

Fix: in two or three lines, say who you are, the kind of role you are targeting, and the one thing you are genuinely known for. Then tailor it to each job.

5. You are applying to the wrong roles, or too few

Sometimes the CV is fine and the targeting is off: you are aiming above your evidence, or spraying the same document at fifty roles instead of tailoring for the right fifteen.

Fix: apply to roles where your CV can honestly show most of what they ask for, and put the saved time into tailoring each one properly. A smaller number of relevant, tailored applications beats a large number of generic ones.

How to diagnose yours

Take one job you applied to and did not hear back on. Put your CV next to the posting and ask: could a stranger, in ten seconds, see why you fit this specific role? If the answer is no, the fix is relevance, and relevance is tailoring.

That is the slow part, which is why we built MyPersona to do it in seconds: it researches the role, then produces a tailored, ATS-safe CV from your real history.