Interviews

Where your CV lands depends on the size of the company. At a firm with a dozen employees it goes to a person, usually the owner or an office manager, who opens it between two other tasks. At a company with a real HR department it goes into an applicant tracking system, which tries to turn your document into structured fields: name, last employer, job title, dates, location, skills.

Both readers give up quickly, and interestingly they give up on the same documents.

Files that break the machine

A CV made from a photo or a scan carries no text at all. The software extracts nothing, so you become an empty record, and the person sees a picture they cannot search. This happens most often to people applying from a phone, and it is the single most expensive mistake in this list.

Two-column layouts are the next one. The parser reads across the page, so your job titles end up interleaved with your language skills. Tables and text boxes do the same thing. Header and footer regions are often skipped entirely, which is a problem if that is where you put your phone number.

Creative fonts and icons render fine for a human and turn into question marks in an extraction. A small envelope icon instead of the word "email" means the field is simply missing.

Send a PDF exported from a text document, one column, a normal font, your contact details in the body. It looks plain. Plain is the point.

What the person actually looks for

In the twenty seconds before deciding whether to keep reading, most recruiters check the same four things: your current or last job title, how long you stayed in your last two jobs, where you are now, and whether the dates make sense. That is why a CV that opens with a paragraph about your career aspirations wastes its best space.

Put the job title you are applying for at the top of the document, above your history, exactly as the employer wrote it. If the ad says "Coordinator for Montage and Installation", write that, not "Installation Professional". The parser matches strings, and the person is scanning for the same words.

Explain gaps in one short line rather than hiding them by stretching dates. "2024–2025: relocation and language course" reads as an adult with a plan. A quietly inflated date reads as a lie when the reference check happens.

Keywords, honestly

Applicant tracking systems do rank candidates by matching terms, which has produced a small industry of advice about stuffing your CV with keywords in white text. Do not. Modern systems strip formatting, so the trick is visible, and the person reading the extracted text sees a list of words you never wrote.

The version that works is duller: name your tools and certificates in the words the industry uses. If you drive a forklift, write the licence category. If you weld, write the process and the standard. If you write software, name the language rather than "modern web technologies".

One file, one name

Save it as your own name and the role: Andrei-Popescu-Tiler.pdf. It ends up in a folder with two hundred files called cv.pdf, and yours is the one that can be found again on the day they decide to call somebody.