Making our smart CV writer has been the culmination of a very personal journey in job hunting and career work. Things have somehow changed of late, and I found myself not entirely ready to catch up to them.
The story starts earlier this year. I was job hunting again, and the numbers stopped making sense. Every couple of years when I do this, I've got more behind me. More shipped, more scale, more of the messy stuff that actually makes someone good at a job. Every time, the jobs get more interesting, the pay does too — it's satisfying to see my career path expand. This year though, fewer people wanted to talk to me about it.
Not that I got zero interviews — just fewer. Enough of a drop that I started keeping a mental tally, comparing this search to the last one, the one before that. This year is unusual.
I sat with it for a while before I let myself get paranoid about it. Markets shift. Economy is what it is. AI is the great disruption. Timing is real. Some months everyone's hiring, some months nobody is. But it kept nagging at me, because the story didn't fit the evidence I actually had about myself.
The CV wasn't the problem. Not in the way I assumed, anyway.
It was built for a human reader, and I hadn't questioned that in years. One person, tired, with forty other CVs in the same folder, who needed to get through mine without drowning in it. My job, writing it, was to protect that person's attention: cut what didn't serve the role, keep it to two pages because two pages is what a tired person can hold in their head before their eyes glaze over, make the call about what mattered so they wouldn't have to.
That's not a bad instinct. For a long time it worked. The tight, curated CV was the whole craft of the format, and I'd gotten decent at it.
I just hadn't noticed that the reader on the other end had quietly stopped being a person.
Gert Schepens