Let me introduce myself before you invest seven minutes reading this blog. I'm not a thought leader. I'm not a guru. I'm not a copywriter, or a marketer. I'm not a LinkedIn top voice. What I am is a recruiter with 27 years' experience, who's made thousands of hires. And more misses than I'd like to admit. What I do know, is what hiring managers, TA, and recruiters actually look for, in people, in CVs, in LinkedIn profiles. The thing that makes someone curious enough to reach out, or actually get back to you after you've applied. Here's a guess. When you apply for a job, you would appreciate, a reply. One where a human has reviewed your profile. A recruiter, or someone, who responds 'let's chat,' or even 'thanks, but no' with a reason attached. Quickly. Rare, huh. I wrote this blog because I'm sick (eye roll) of hearing what passes for career advice these days. Most of it, whether paid, or free, is well intended. But it's poor, or so generic it could be about anyone. Logical on paper, maybe. Formulaic and dated in practice. That's what I'd like to fix. Here's what this blog is NOT about: 1. Job search strategy. 2. Networking (this is about getting your positioning clear first, not tactics). 3. CV templates (length, formatting, all of it). 4. Interview prep. 5. The ATS rejecting good candidates. That particular myth has had a long run for something that mostly isn't true. If it interests you, Greg Wyatt's piece on the subject covers it properly. Here's what this blog IS about: It's the thing underneath all of those. How to think about standing out, before you touch a CV, a LinkedIn profile, a cover letter. Before you set up a job alert, network, or send off your CV. Most advice never gets there. It stops at formatting, keywords, and activity, and calls that a strategy. It isn't one. It's a to-do list dressed up as one. Here's the mess, as it actually stands. The Mess 1. "Optimize your CV for the ATS." This chases a robot instead of a human. Most ATS rejection stories are myth, you're not getting filtered because a keyword didn't register with the algorithm. There's a more useful question though: did you actually answer the screening questions? If not, that's on you, not the algorithm. 2. "Tailor every application to the job ad." This keeps you reactive, permanently responding to someone else's posting instead of building a position people come looking for. It's the wrong end of the transaction to be perfecting. There are tools now that'll auto-tailor your CV to any job ad in seconds. That doesn't fix the problem. You're not being more relevant, you're just gaming a system that was already broken before AI got involved. And most of these job ads are badly written to begin with: they talk about the company, the mission statement, the perks, the "fast-paced culture," then a wish list of requirements underneath. What they should talk about is the actual challenge on the other side of the hire, and the impact you'd have solving it. Go look at your own recruiter's job ads. Then ask yourself honestly: is tailoring your CV to that even worth it? 3. "Apply to more roles. Network more." Same advice, different outfit: volume. Apply to fifty roles, or have fifty coffees, doesn't matter which. If nobody can tell what you're actually offering, you're just multiplying the number of people who get to ignore you. 4. "Keep a few different CV versions on hand." One for the sales-adjacent roles, one for the technical ones, one for whatever "multi-skilled" is supposed to mean this week. Be honest about what that actually is: maintaining three or four documents, then tailoring each one per posting on top of that, is a part-time job nobody is paying you for. It's the same wasted effort as tailoring to a bad job ad, just multiplied by however many versions of yourself you're keeping on file. 5. "Pay a professional CV writer, or spend weeks with a traditional outplacement firm." I've had plenty of friends reach out after losing their job, made redundant, going through an outplacement firm's programme. Modules, workbooks, the full package. Every one of them came out the other end with a CV so bland it could belong to anyone in their function. Twenty hours in, and it wasn't free, wasn't rushed, and still didn't work. Couldn't make this sh*t up if I tried. This is what's actually out there, repeated across a thousand LinkedIn posts and a hundred PDFs that all say the same handful of things in a different font. None of this is on you. You're working with advice built for gaming a system, against job ads written from a template by someone with neither the time nor the brief to write a better one, and through a process nobody designed with you in mind. The frustration is fair. It just needs pointing somewhere useful. The Thinking Gap Being found and being chosen are different problems. A recruiter can find a hundred CVs with the right keywords in an afternoon. What they rarely find, because it barely exists, is a clear, specific answer to one question: what does this person do better than the other ninety-nine, and how do I know? Or picture a founder reading your profile, asking a harder version of the same thing: can this person actually deliver the change I need to move the needle, not just do the job competently. That's not a formatting gap. It's a thinking gap. And it shows up consistently in the work of people who study this properly, even though none of them are necessarily talking about CVs. Lou Adler has spent decades studying what actually predicts a good hire . His conclusion, in short: what someone has already done is a far better signal than what they say they can do. Most CVs list responsibilities. Almost none show performance against a specific objective. Dorie Clark writes about professional differentiation and reinvention . Her work keeps returning to the same point: most people can't articulate what makes them different, not because it isn't there, but because nobody's ever asked them to say it out loud. William Arruda has built a career around personal branding . His central argument: the traits people dismiss as 'just how I am' are usually the exact things worth naming and building a reputation around. Put those three together and a pattern shows up. Standing out isn't about more accomplishments, a longer skills list, or a cleverer CV trick. It's about being able to answer a small number of questions clearly, before you write anything down. Three questions worth answering first 1. What have you actually delivered, with evidence. 2. What do you do differently to the people around you. 3. What are you actually looking for next, and why. Most professionals have never sat down and answered these honestly. They go straight to the CV instead, and the CV inherits the gap. Answering those three properly is the actual work. Everything else in this piece has been building to that one point. Here's the other problem nobody names: most guides that try to walk you through this assume you have time. Lots of it. As if you can read a book and digest all of it instantly, squeeze a week-long course into a lunch break, or work through a 35-page manual before your next meeting. Most people don't have that kind of time. They have an hour, maybe two, squeezed between everything else. Pointed questions, asked in the right order, close that thinking gap faster. Where this shows up for Software Engineering Leaders Say you're a Software Engineering Manager. Maybe you want more scope where you are. Maybe you just want a better role than the one you're sitting in. Either way, this is exactly where most people get stuck. Not because the substance is missing. Because it's never been structured and said clearly enough for someone else to act on it. If you're sending out applications and hearing nothing back, or you've made the case for more scope and it hasn't landed, the problem usually isn't effort. It's that your value and positioning have never been put into words clearly enough for someone else to act on. Why I built a playbook instead of doing this one-on-one So what's the actual fix? Not another book. Not another course. Not another generic guide promising to help you stand out, that doesn't actually help you stand out. I'd love to sit down with everyone over a coffee, or a Zoom, if anyone still has time for either these days. But that doesn't scale, and honestly, it doesn't need to. So I built a playbook that does the job instead: the same questions I'd ask you in a room, minus the room, minus the calendar back-and-forth, minus the small talk. This one takes 1-2 hours, not a weekend. It interviews you, one sharp question at a time, the same way a good conversation would, and it comes with AI prompts built in so you can move through it fast rather than staring at a blank page. Ramona and I are on hand too, if you'd rather talk it through on a call than work through it solo. But the playbook itself doesn't need you to. Interested in using the playbook? Fill out the short form below and we'll send you a copy. We keep it gated on purpose. The moment everyone has it, it stops giving anyone an edge. Even if you don't update your cover page, or articulate your value and position yourself better right away, hopefully this made you stop, and think about how you'll go about it next time. Blog author: Craig Bagshaw I help Heads of Software Engineering go from slow, unscalable hiring cycles to securing high-calibre engineers within budget and timeline, by replacing subjective, low-signal screening with a structured, evidence-based hiring system. I spend most of my time these days advising companies on what NOT to do when it comes to hiring strategy, and how to market or position jobs so they actually stand out from the hundreds of other software engineering roles posted every month.

Does hitting the "apply" button 20 times a week, only to be met with the deafening sound of crickets, sound familiar?