Why is my CV being rejected? Four reasons

Reading time: 5 minutes

It's rarely down to your experience

You send off ten, twenty applications and nothing comes back. No invitation, often not even a rejection. It's tempting to think you're not good enough — but in most cases, that's not what's actually happening.

What usually does happen: your CV gets rejected before anyone has seen your experience. Because of a filter that can't read your layout, or a recruiter who couldn't find what they were looking for in eight seconds. These are four concrete causes, and all four can be fixed.

Reason 1: your layout doesn't get past the filter

Most vacancies now run through an ATS — a system that scans your CV before a human ever sees it. Such a system reads text, not design. Two columns side by side get jumbled together. Text in a text box or an image gets skipped entirely. A table of your skills comes out as a row of disconnected words with no context.

The annoying part is that you won't notice any of this. Your CV looks great in your own PDF viewer, while a half-mangled text arrives on the other end.

What to do about it: one column, standard headings, no text boxes, no images containing text. Save as a PDF, unless the vacancy explicitly asks for Word.

Reason 2: your CV talks about tasks, not results

"Responsible for planning" tells an employer what was in your job description. It says nothing about how well you did it. Compare that to "planning for 40 technicians, reduced downtime from 12% to 4%" and the difference is immediately obvious.

This is the most common weakness, and at the same time the easiest to fix. Go through your last two roles and ask, for every line: and then what? What did it produce, how much, how fast, for how many people?

Not everything can be expressed in numbers, and it doesn't need to be. "Took over onboarding new colleagues when it was being neglected" is also a result.

Reason 3: the same CV for every vacancy

One CV that you send everywhere scores a little on every vacancy, and not well enough on any of them. Both the filter and the recruiter are looking for what that specific vacancy asks for — and if the vacancy says "project management" while your CV says "coordination", that won't match, even if you're doing the same work.

What to do about it: read the vacancy and use the words it contains, as long as they're accurate. Put the experience closest to that role at the top. It takes ten minutes per application and makes more difference than ten extra applications with a generic CV.

Reason 4: there's too much on it

Two pages is the accepted upper limit. Go longer and you force the reader to hunt for what's important themselves — and nobody does that.

What can usually go: roles from more than fifteen years ago (one line is enough), courses that have nothing to do with the role, your driving licence for an office job, the line saying references are available on request, and a profile summary full of words like "driven" and "results-oriented" that everyone writes and nobody proves.

And what if it's actually down to something else?

Sometimes it genuinely is something else: a tight market in your field, or a vacancy where someone internal was already lined up. That happens, and it's out of your control.

But that's exactly why you want the four things above to be sorted. You don't want to neglect what's within your own control.

In short

• A CV is usually rejected because of its form, not the substance of your career.
• One column and standard headings get through the ATS filter; two columns and text boxes don't.
• Replace tasks with results — that's the biggest gain for the least effort.
• Tailor your CV per vacancy and use the words from the job posting.
• More than two pages works against you.

Wondering whether your own CV will get past the filter? With CV-Refresher, you upload your current CV and get back a version that's been checked against all four points.

See what could be improved on your CV →