Getting past screening and reaching a human being

How screening works

At large companies a CV first passes through a system matching it against the posting. At small ones the system is a person skimming forty applications in an hour — effectively the same machine, only tired.

Either way the decision takes seconds and rests on formal signals. Annoying, but it has to be reckoned with.

What helps you through

Words from the posting. If the posting says "PostgreSQL" and your CV says "Postgres", the match may not register. Use their wording where it genuinely describes your skills.

A job title. State what you're applying for — "junior Python developer", not "versatile specialist".

An ordinary format. Text, not an image. No two-column tables, no clever layout. Many attractive templates read as mush to a machine.

Plain section headings. "Experience", "Projects", "Skills", "Education". Originality hurts here.

A conventional file format. Send what they ask for. If nothing is specified, a standard document or a link to a profile.

What to avoid

• Technologies you don't know, added "to pass the filter". An interview exposes that in a minute and ends worse than a rejection.
• Solid text with no structure.
• Exotic fonts and coloured blocks.
• Files named "cv final final 2 (1)".

What a human actually reads

Once past the first pass, a CV gets skimmed in this order: the title, the first two lines, project names, links.

Practical conclusion: put what matters at the top. Projects don't belong at the bottom of the page.

On the cover note

It works when it contains what the CV doesn't: why this company, and which piece of your work is closest to what they need.

Three or four sentences. A cover note that retells the CV goes unread.

What makes you visible

A link that opens. A project someone can poke at in two seconds sets you apart from most applicants, whose links are either missing or broken.

And if your part in a team project is confirmed by someone else, you land in the small group of candidates whose claims don't need checking. To a person working through forty applications, that stands out.