Career Intelligence
CV advice, ATS optimisation, career strategy, and job search tactics, from the people building Karro.
You've uploaded your CV to a tool. It's given you a score. Maybe it's 62. Maybe it's 84. Now what? CV scores are useful — but only if you understand what they're actually measuring and what they're not. A score without context is just a number. Here's what yours is telling you, and what to do about it.
Most people treat their LinkedIn profile and their CV as two separate things. Two different documents with different purposes and different levels of effort. The CV gets carefully crafted for each application. The LinkedIn profile gets updated occasionally, whenever someone remembers it exists. This is a mistake, and it's costing people interviews they don't know they're missing.
Changing careers is no longer unusual. A third of UK workers plan to find a new job or make a career change in the next twelve months. The average person holds around twelve jobs across their working life. Non-linear career paths have become the norm rather than the exception.
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.
A gap in your employment history used to feel like a career-ending admission. Something to minimise, paper over, or explain away with carefully chosen language before a recruiter decided you were a red flag. That thinking is out of date, and the data backs it up.
You've probably heard that recruiters spend about six seconds reading your CV. The number gets quoted constantly, and while the exact figure varies depending on the study, the underlying point is solid: the initial assessment is fast, it's a skim not a read, and your CV either passes it or it doesn't. Here's what's actually happening in those seconds, and what it means for how you structure your CV.
The advice to "tailor your CV for every job" is given constantly and followed rarely. Most people either ignore it and send the same CV to every application, or take it so literally that they spend two hours rewriting everything before each submission. Neither approach is right. Here's a practical way to think about it.
The skills section is where most CVs either gain ground or lose it quietly. It's one of the first places a recruiter scans, one of the key targets for ATS keyword matching, and also the section most commonly filled with content that adds no value whatsoever.Here's how to get it right.
Everyone's heard that applicant tracking systems are the gatekeepers of the modern job market. What fewer people know is that most of the advice about beating them is based on a misunderstanding of what these systems actually do. Here's what's genuinely happening when you submit a CV online.
Why Your CV Keeps Getting Rejected (And It's Probably Not What You Think)
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