Getting your CV seen and shortlisted ??

I’m speaking with more and more candidates who feel that they’re applying for roles that are relevant, but feel like their application is landing straight into a black hole ??.

With new features being added to job boards like ‘Easy Apply’, any internal or agency recruiter may be receiving 10x the applications that they were previously. While this solves one problem, it also poses a whole new challenge for candidates – getting your CV/application seen.

Here’s some tips to improve the chances of your CV getting seen and shortlisted:

?? Keywords

The most obvious but overlooked of all of these. Particularly in technology, your CV/profile should clearly reflect and expand on the tools/technologies you have worked on. For example: “Here I worked with AWS” vs. “Here I worked with Amazon Web Services (AWS) as the main cloud platform, including tools and services such as EC2, S3, RDS, Lambda, Redshift and Cloudfront”.

Guess which one is more likely to get your CV to the top of the ‘recommended

candidates’ section ???

??? Expanding on acronyms: Wherever possible, having the acronym both spelt out AND abbreviated will 2x the chance of your CV hitting that key word criteria. This also doesn’t make the assumption that the individual reviewing your CV knows every abbreviation, which will be the case on occasion.

?? Don’t be afraid of the detail

Your CV doesn’t have to be a huge list of skills to incorporate key words (but if you're in technology - having a skills list is very useful!), don’t be afraid to expand on responsibilities/experience to include these. For example:

“In this role I worked with Python for application development”

vs.

“In this role I worked with Python to build customer-facing web applications using frameworks such as Flask and Django. I created RESTful APIs to handle backend logic, and integrated this with front-end technologies (JavaScript).”

Once again, guess what CV is most likely to get seen here ???

?? Highlight Relevant Projects and Contributions

Don’t shy away from showcasing personal projects, open-source contributions, or anything else that demonstrates your passion and skills in action. These can be just as impressive as your commercial work experience, especially if they align closely with the job you’re applying for.

Example: “In my spare time, I developed a personal project using React and Node.js to create a budgeting app that was featured on Product Hunt and received 10,000+ downloads.”

This shows you’re not just someone who does the job—you live and breathe technology. If you're unsure where to add this, I would suggest having this under your 'Personal Projects' or 'Hobbies' section at the end of your CV. It sounds much better than "Hobbies - Reading" ??. This also helps to hit those important keyword metrics mentioned earlier!

?? Update Your CV Regularly

This one is so easy not to do, particularly if you're in a role where you're happy and can't see yourself leaving anytime soon. My advice is whenever you have an achievement at work, whether that be solving a difficult challenge or having a significant impact - send yourself a quick email with the subject 'Personal achievements', noting the achievement at a high-level.

Not only does this mean you're consistently documenting your impact, but even if you stay in your role and never have use for this, it's nice to look back on your achievements to remind yourself of the impact you're having.

?? Remember to show the impact of your actions!

Something I have seen hiring managers focus on in the last 6-12 months, particularly at Staff-Principal level and above, is wanting to see that candidates have a (and recognise their own) signifiant impact.

I would always strongly advise having one example that details this, and find the STAR (Situation, Task, Action, Result)method the best approach in doing so (Situation, Task, Action, Result). Here's an example of this:

Recent achievements:

Customer Management System - POC build and deployment

(Situation) As a business, we were facing performance issues with our customer management system, which was affecting user experience and leading to customer complaints. The system’s slow response times were causing friction during high-traffic periods, impacting our sales and customer satisfaction.

(Task) I was tasked with building a Proof of Concept (POC) to see if we could improve the system's performance by migrating our existing monolithic application to a microservices architecture using cloud technologies.

(Action) I successfully built the POC using Docker and Kubernetes for containerisation and orchestration, deployed on AWS using services such as EC2, ECS, and RDS. I re-architected key components of the system into independent microservices, optimised the database queries, and implemented caching using Redis. I presented the POC to the co-founders, demonstrating a significant reduction in load times and increased reliability during peak usage.

(Result) Following the success of the POC, the company adopted the microservices architecture across our customer management platform. This change resulted in a 60% reduction in system downtime and a 40% improvement in response times, which significantly enhanced user experience. The improved performance helped increase customer retention rates by 20% and contributed to a new upsell opportunity that added ￡500k in annual recurring revenue.

This demonstrates not only what you did, but how and why, showcasing a product-focus and a commercial mindset ??.

?? I'm here to help

Recruiters get the benefit of speaking with job board providers, LinkedIn and much more to learn how the ATS algorithms work, whereas candidates don't have this benefit.

If you would benefit some advice and feedback on your CV/LinkedIn profile in the meantime, feel free to send me a connection request and a message, I'm happy to help ????