I have this conversation at least twice a week.
I’ll spend forty minutes on the phone with someone genuinely impressive. They’ve rebuilt an HR function from scratch. They’ve handled something that could have ended up in a tribunal and didn’t. They’ve taken a team through an acquisition, halved an absence rate, or set up a payroll system single-handedly.
By the end of that call, I know exactly why my client would want them. They’re perfect for the new HR role I have just secured.
Then I open their CV, and none of it is there.
This isn’t a criticism of the people I speak to. It happens so often that I’ve stopped being surprised by it. But it costs candidates roles they should have been shortlisted for, and it costs my clients access to people they’d have hired on the spot.
Your CV describes the job, not what you did in it
This is the big one.
Most CVs I receive read like a job description. A tidy list of everything that fell within someone’s remit. Responsible for the full employee lifecycle. Managed a team of six. Oversaw the annual training plan.
All true. All completely uninformative.
The client already knows what an HR Manager is responsible for. What they don’t know is what changed because you were the one doing it. Did the team grow or shrink, and why? What did you inherit, and what state was it in when you left? What went badly wrong, and what did you do about it?
The gap between “responsible for” and “here’s what actually happened” is the gap between a CV that gets read and one that gets skimmed.
Your best work is often missing entirely
I’ve lost count of the times someone has mentioned something extraordinary in passing on a call, and I’ve gone back to their CV to find it isn’t mentioned anywhere.
The restructure. The TUPE transfer. The grievance nobody else would touch. The system they implemented while doing their actual job. The culture programme that turned a toxic department around.
There’s a pattern to it. People leave out the work that felt like firefighting rather than strategy, and they leave out anything that wasn’t strictly in their job title. Which is almost always the most valuable experience they have.
The thing you’re proudest of tends to be the thing you’ve assumed nobody would be interested in. Put it in.
There isn’t a single number on the page
Very few CVs that land in my inbox contain a figure of any kind.
Not everyone works in a role with obvious metrics, and I’d never suggest inventing them. But there is nearly always something countable. How many people. How many sites. What budget. How many cases a year. What headcount growth you saw. What the absence rate was before you arrived and what it was when you left.
One good number does more work than a whole paragraph of adjectives.
Your job title is doing all the talking, and it’s saying the wrong thing
Job titles are wildly inconsistent between organisations, and plenty of people are carrying one that badly understates what they actually do.
I see it constantly in this region, particularly in smaller businesses. An HR coordinator title on someone running a full generalist remit. An administrator title on someone who is, in practice, the entire HR function. A Marketing Exec title on someone doing management level work across a group of businesses.
If your title undersells you, the content underneath it has to work twice as hard. Don’t leave the reader to work out that you were operating two levels above the label. They won’t.
The dates don’t add up
This is the unglamorous one, and it matters far more than people think.
A missing role that leaves an apparent 2 year gap. Dates that overlap in ways that aren’t possible. A job board export that has scrambled the chronology. A page that’s dropped out of the document without anyone noticing. A typo in the headings.
None of these say anything meaningful about the person. All of them make a hiring manager pause. And a hiring manager with thirty CVs to get through doesn’t pause for long before moving on to the next one.
Get someone else to read it. They’ll spot in two minutes what you’ve been looking past for two years.
Nobody wants to feel like they’re bragging
Underneath all of the above is something much simpler.
A lot of people, and in my experience disproportionately the ones who are genuinely very good at their jobs, find it deeply uncomfortable to write down what they’ve achieved.
They hedge. They give the credit to the team. They describe a significant piece of work as “helped with” or “was involved in”. I’ve challenged people on the phone and had them reluctantly admit that yes, actually, they led it. They wrote it. It was their idea.
Your CV is not the place for modesty. It’s a factual record of what you have done. Stating it plainly isn’t boasting.
What I’d actually do about it
Start with your last two roles and ignore the rest for now. That’s where the attention goes anyway.
For each one, write down three things that changed because you were there. Not responsibilities. Changes. Then put a number against each one if you possibly can.
Add back in the work that didn’t fit your job title. The crisis, the project, the system, the awful six months you got the team through.
Then read the whole thing and ask yourself one question: does this sound like the person my colleagues would describe? If it doesn’t, it isn’t finished.
The reason I raise this so often isn’t that CVs are precious. It’s that your CV is the only thing standing between you and being screened out by someone who will never get to speak to you.
You could be perfect for the role and never make the list.
Worth an hour of your weekend.
Until next Sunday,
Lyndsey
P.S. If you’ve just realised your CV doesn’t sound like you, now’s a good time to fix it. We’ve got live roles in HR and Business Support across Cumbria and the North East. Head over to our jobs page and take a look!
