May 2026
Your CV Didn’t Fail — It Never Stood a Chance
There’s a persistent narrative in the media currently: ‘the job market is broken’. Roles attract hundreds of applicants, good people can’t get interviews, and employers seem impossibly picky. All of that contains some truth. But from where I sit, as someone who reviews CVs regularly, there’s a more uncomfortable explanation: most people simply don’t understand how hiring works now; it’s changed.
The modern recruitment process is not primarily human. Before your CV ever reaches a hiring manager, it is often filtered by software, Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS). These systems are now standard across large organisations, government departments, and even platforms like Seek and TradeMe Jobs. Their purpose is not to appreciate your personality, your effort, or your “potential.” Their purpose is to sort, rank, and eliminate. And they are very good at it.
Here’s the critical point: if your CV is not written to be read by software first, it will probably never be read by a human at all. This is where many applicants go wrong. They spend hours choosing a visually appealing template often downloaded for free online, complete with coloured sidebars, graphics, columns and icons. It looks polished. It feels modern. It is, unfortunately, exactly what the software struggles to read.
ATS systems favour simplicity. A clean, linear document. No text boxes. No columns. No graphics (definitely no pictures!). No blocks of colour. In other words, the opposite of what many templates encourage.
The second, and more significant mistake is content. Most CVs are written as static life summaries: “Here is everything I’ve done.” But employers are not asking for your life story. They are asking a very specific question: “Can you do this job?”
The only reliable way to answer that question is to mirror the job advertisement itself. That means using the same keywords and phrases. If the role requires “stakeholder engagement,” then “working with people” is not a match in the eyes of the software. If the ad specifies “inventory management,” and your CV says “stock control,” it’s not a match, even though the tasks are similar. This is not about tricking the system. It is about speaking the same language. Think of the job advertisement as both a brief and a marking schedule. The closer your CV aligns with it, the higher you score.
There are also structural expectations that many applicants miss. Two pages is the standard benchmark in New Zealand. Anything longer suggests a lack of focus. Anything shorter, for an experienced worker, can look underdeveloped. Bullet points should be concise and focused, not vague descriptions. And then there is the issue of effort versus effectiveness. Many people apply for dozens, sometimes hundreds of jobs with the same CV. It feels productive. It is not. A single, well-targeted application will consistently outperform mass applications using a generic document.
From an employer’s perspective, the process is rational. Faced with high volumes, they need efficient ways to reduce the pool. From a job seeker’s perspective, it can feel arbitrary and opaque. But it isn’t random. It is a system with rules. And like any system, those who understand the rules perform better within it.
So before concluding that the market is impossible, it’s worth asking a different question: is your CV designed for the job market as it actually exists, or for the one that existed in pre-Covid times?
Because right now, that distinction is everything.
This editorial was written by Merrie McDougall - Master of Career Development (distinction), BA (psych), GCCD, GDCD, PMCDANZ. She is a Career Specialist based in Auckland.