What I Look for When I Read Your CV

A version of this article appeared in 2019 as "Why I Won't Hire You — 5 Honest Tips to a Better CV". Rewritten in August 2026: a few hundred CVs later, from the other side of more hiring rounds, and with AI in the mix.

Over the years I've read hundreds of CVs — first hiring developer advocates, these days hiring engineers. Here's the thing that took me embarrassingly long to say out loud: most CVs that don't work fail on the document level, not the person level. Behind many a rejected PDF was probably a perfectly capable human whose one page just didn't let them through.

The document level is fixable in an evening. So instead of telling you what annoys me, let me tell you what works on me — five things, plus what changed now that AI writes half the CVs I see.

1. One page is a skill demo

If you can squeeze years of work into one page — two at the absolute maximum — that's a clear sign to me that you know how to work with information: what to keep, what to cut, what matters to whom. That skill happens to be in the job description of every role I've ever hired for, whether we wrote it down or not.

There's also simple mechanics on my side: a CV gets about ninety seconds of honest attention on the first pass. A tight page puts your best material inside that window. Cutting hurts — but every cut you make is a decision I don't have to, and I notice.

2. Ask each line: is it relevant to this job?

I've read CVs describing burger-flipping at McDonald's and — memorably, true story — the number of graves dug. And look: I understand you worked at McDonald's, and I believe it taught you real things — showing up, handling customers, surviving a rush hour. But is it relevant to the job you're applying to? If it is — it's the main experience you have, or it genuinely taught you something you still use — then frame it exactly that way, and it earns its line. If it isn't, save the story for the interview. I promise I'll ask, and I'll enjoy it more there.

The same question works for skills. Word and Excel on an IT CV? I already assume you know them — that's precisely why they don't need a line (unless you're the person who builds multi-sheet tax calculators, in which case, tell me more). "10 years of experience in XML"? I'd much rather have one plain paragraph about a system you built with it. Every line that passes the relevance test makes the ones around it more believable.

3. Show your work — honestly

List what you specialize in, not every technology you've ever brushed against — a short list I can believe beats a long one I can't. Then spend the saved space on the thing that actually informs me: what you built, what your contribution was, and what came of it. Brief and concrete beats long and impressive. I'd honestly rather read three plain sentences about a project that half-failed — and what you learned — than a wall of superlatives.

I've also seen elaborate tables breaking down the years and months of experience per programming language, and pie charts and progress bars rating skills out of ten. I get the intent — you want to be measurable. But "C# ▓▓▓▓▓▓▓░░░ 7/10" measured how, compared to whom? A CV is a document, not an infographic (designers and BI folks excepted — that's your portfolio speaking). What the numbers are trying to say, one honest sentence about real work says better — and the interview is where I get to see you think.

4. Aim, don't broadcast

Here's the counterintuitive math of applications: ten CVs written to ten researched companies will outperform a hundred copies of one CV sprayed at a job board. Every experienced reader can tell within seconds which kind landed in their inbox — and a page that was clearly written to us tells me you chose us, before we ever spoke. That's the strongest motivation signal a document can carry.

Fewer, better-aimed applications also do something for you: they force you to figure out where you actually want to work before you get there. That clarity leaks into every line of the CV.

5. Add a cover letter when your path needs a narrator

Switching stacks? Changing roles? Leaving the field you've spent a decade in? Your CV can show the facts of a pivot, but it can't explain the why — and the why is the whole story. Three honest paragraphs about your motivation turn a confusing CV into a compelling one. When the path is straight, skip it; when the path bends, narrate it.

What AI changed — and what it didn't

This rewrite exists partly because the game changed. In 2026, I assume most CVs I read have passed through an LLM, and many were written by one end to end. Two consequences follow, and they point in the same direction.

First: polish is now free, so polish is now worthless as a signal. Flawless formatting and confident phrasing used to hint at care; today they're the default output. What stands out instead is the thing AI cannot supply: specific, verifiable, first-person detail. The model doesn't know that your migration cut the build time in half, or that you were the one who talked the team out of the rewrite. Only you can put that on the page — and it now does more work than every adjective combined, precisely because nobody can generate it.

Second: the screening got automated too. Your CV will likely meet keyword filters and AI screeners before human eyes. The answer isn't to game them — it's the same advice as tip #4: read the job posting carefully and use its actual vocabulary for the things you have honestly done. Tailoring, it turns out, was ATS optimization all along.

So use AI the way you'd use a sharp editor: let it tighten your sentences, never let it invent your career. Interviews still exist, and the distance between your CV and the person who shows up becomes obvious within about ten minutes. Honesty was always the durable strategy; AI just raised the price of everything else.

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That's it — and the old paradox still holds: the less information you include and the fewer companies you address, the higher your chances of getting hired. Isn't that great?

One well-aimed, honest page whose goal isn't to list your life — it's to start a conversation. I'm on the reading side again these days: make my ninety seconds easy, and I'll happily spend the next sixty minutes with you instead.