Two candidates. Similar experience. Similar background. One gets called for interviews regularly. The other doesn't hear back.
The difference is rarely the experience itself. It's almost always the CV.
Here's what separates the ones that work from the ones that don't.
It Passes the First Ten Seconds
Recruiters spend between six and eleven seconds on an initial CV scan before deciding whether it's worth reading further. In that window they're not evaluating your career, they're triaging. Does this person look like a plausible fit? Is this worth my time?
A CV that passes that test does one thing well: it makes the answer to both questions immediately obvious. The professional summary names the relevant experience. The most recent job title is clearly visible and broadly matches the target role. The layout is clean and easy to scan.
A CV that fails does the opposite. The summary is either missing or generic. The structure requires a recruiter to hunt for the information they need. The formatting; multiple columns, decorative elements and tables slow down the scan and introduce friction at the worst possible moment.
The question to ask yourself is: if someone who doesn't know your career history reads the top third of your CV for ten seconds, can they tell in one sentence what you do and who you'd be good for? If not, the CV needs work before anything else does.
It Uses the Right Language
Most CVs that don't work aren't weak on experience. They're weak on language.
The experience may be genuinely relevant. But if it's described using different terminology than the job description uses, a recruiter scanning quickly won't make that connection. If the job says "stakeholder management" and the CV says "client liaison," if the job says "P&L ownership" and the CV says "managed budgets," the match that exists in reality doesn't register on the page.
The CV that gets interviews uses the employer's own language to describe the candidate's own experience. This isn't embellishment — it's translation. Read the job description carefully, identify the three or four key phrases that appear most prominently, and check whether those exact phrases appear in your CV. If they don't, and your experience genuinely reflects them, add them.
It Shows Impact, Not Just Activity
The single most common weakness across CVs at every level is bullet points that describe what someone was responsible for rather than what they actually achieved.
"Responsible for managing a team of eight" tells a recruiter what you had. "Led a team of eight to deliver a £1.2m project three weeks ahead of schedule" tells them what you did with it.
Including quantified for up to 40% of your achievements can increase interview callback rates. Yet analysis of CVs across industries consistently finds that fewer than one in ten job titles in CVs include any metrics at all. The bar is genuinely low — and clearing it significantly distinguishes a CV from the majority.
For every bullet point on your CV, ask: what changed because of this? What was the outcome? What was the scale? If you can answer that question, the answer belongs in the bullet point.
It's Tailored, Not Generic
83% of recruiters say they're more likely to hire a candidate whose CV has been tailored to the specific role. Despite this, over half of all applications still arrive with a generic, untailored CV.
A tailored CV doesn't mean rewriting everything. It means adjusting your professional summary to lead with the most relevant experience for this particular role, updating your skills section to mirror the language in the job description, and checking that your most recent role bullets emphasise the aspects most relevant to what's being hired for.
A generic CV works for no role particularly well. A tailored CV is written for one role, for one employer — and the recruiter can feel the difference.
It Looks Like It Was Written by a Professional
Formatting matters more than most people think. Not because visual design wins interviews, but because poor formatting is a fast-track to rejection.
Spelling and grammar errors are the single biggest turn-off cited by UK recruiters, flagged by over 50% as an immediate negative signal. An unusual layout, non-standard section headers, or a CV that's difficult to parse on screen all create friction. None of these things are difficult to fix. All of them can end an application before it starts.
The standard that works: clean single-column layout, standard section headers, reverse chronological order, consistent formatting throughout. This sounds unremarkable because it is — and that's the point. A recruiter processing 200 applications wants clarity, not creativity.
The Honest Assessment
The gap between CVs that generate interviews and those that don't is almost never about the underlying experience. It's about whether that experience is clearly communicated, in the right language, in the right order, with evidence that it produced results.
Most people are closer to that standard than they realise. A few targeted changes such as a rewritten summary, sharper bullet points, language that mirrors the job description can make a significant difference to callback rates.
Karro analyses your CV across all of these dimensions — structure, language, impact, and ATS compatibility; and tells you specifically where you're losing interviews and what to change. Free to try.