I saw a post from Sukh Pabial on LinkedIn this week about his year of searching for a full-time role. I’d encourage you to read it. It is honest, it is well put, and it has resonated with hundreds of people.

One paragraph caught me. He described a lot of CV advice being shared as “tosh”. The worst offender, in his view, was someone suggesting you match your CV to each job description so the AI system can find you. For every application he submits, he said, that is just not going to happen.

I messaged him directly – I wanted to check his comment wasn’t aimed at me, and we had a good conversation.

But the point is worth unpacking publicly, because I think it conflates two things that need separating.

There is CV advice that is tosh.

Keyword stuffing and gaming ATS filters with hollow language, which passes a machine and convinces no human, is rife. Producing a different personality for every application until you no longer recognise yourself in the document. That is noise, and there is a lot of it.

And then there is something else entirely.

Read the person specification and treat it as a marking scheme. Identify every essential criterion and make sure your CV answers each one explicitly, in the employer’s language, with evidence. Do not assume the recruiter will join the dots – they won’t.

That isn’t gaming the system – it is just making your argument clearly.

The reason I feel strongly about this is that I spent the last week doing exactly this with real people applying for real jobs. A CV arrived in my inbox after a job fair. The person had a strong background, genuine experience, and an immediate rejection waiting to happen. Not because the person lacked capability but because their CV wasn’t making the case.

The experience was there.

The argument was not.

But here is the thing I want to be honest about.

Later in the same conversation, Sukh told me something important. He has had multiple recruiters review his CV. He has tailored versions – one for L&D roles and one for Talent. He has matched language, used company terminology, and built in evidence. He is doing everything right by conventional measures.

And he is still hitting a wall.

That is not a CV problem. It is a structural problem.

Oversaturated pipelines at the senior level and ATS filters calibrated for conformity. Hiring managers working to narrow briefs with little room to exercise judgement and seek out capability. A market where strong, experienced people are losing out not to weaker candidates but to equally strong ones — and where the system provides almost no signal about why.

No CV guide fixes that, and pretending otherwise would be its own kind of tosh.

So let me be clear about what good CV advice actually is and is not. It is the minimum discipline required to give yourself a fighting chance in a broken system. It is not a guarantee or a substitute for the structural reforms that hiring needs. And it is most useful for people who are not yet making their argument clearly – not for those who have done the work and are still being filtered out by a system that cannot see them.

Those are two different problems. Collapsing them – treating every rejection as a CV problem – is one of the ways well-meaning advice becomes unhelpful noise.

Yesterday I went to a Jobcentre Plus office to support their Work Coaches with a free session.

I was expecting five people; I went into a room with two of their team, and we joined a Teams call with 70 other people.

That tells you something about the appetite for wanting to learn about how to operate in the modern landscape.

The session was built around a simple idea that cuts through most of the noise around CVs and applications. Before you write a word, get clear on what you are trying to get out of the CV or application.

The answer, if you didn’t know, is an interview.

Most people skip this step. They open a saved older version of their CV, stare at it, and start listing the jobs they’ve done. The result is a record of their career, not an argument to be shortlisted for an interview, let alone a specific role.

The framework I use is straightforward. Most organisations look for specific skills across the person specification and job description. These skills tend to fall into three categories:

• People skills – communication, empathy, teamwork;
• Process skills – technical expertise, attention to detail, systems;
• Personal skills – self-management, resilience, adaptability.

Most roles ask for a combination of these – usually more people and personal in the specification and process tests in the job description. Unfortunately many CVs do not make that combination visible.

We talked about how AI was also impacting the recruitment process – should we use it and recommend it to customers? Does the tool matter — Copilot, Gemini, ChatGPT? What is the difference between free and paid?

All good questions. The honest answers are: yes, with judgement; somewhat, but less than you think; and more than most people realise.

What I kept coming back to is this. AI is a drafting tool, not a thinking tool. It can help you structure language, mirror terminology, and produce a first draft faster than you could do it alone. What it cannot do is decide which role is worth applying for, identify which of your experiences actually maps to the criteria, or make the argument for you. That judgement has to come from a human, and, as I continue to say:

You. Can’t. Automate. Nuance.

The Work Coaches in that room are the humans in the loop for people who do not have a network, a mentor, or someone who will sit with them and say: your experience is there, but your argument is not. That is not a small thing.

Back to the LinkedIn post.

150+ reactions, 46 comments, almost all of them in solidarity. Keep going, the system is broken, you are not alone.

All true but none of it is actionable.

I am not criticising that; indeed the support is genuine and it matters to people who are trying really hard to regain employment. But the conversation the post opened deserves more than commiseration. What actually helps people get through a hiring system that is opaque, automated, and often poorly designed? It is the question which is still largely unanswered in the thread.

For some people, the answer starts with a CV that makes the argument properly. Three categories of skill, a person specification treated as a marking scheme, language that mirrors what the employer actually asked for. As someone at the Jobcentre Plus session yesterday said, this is common sense — and for the most part it is.

For others – experienced, capable, doing everything right – the CV is already doing its job and the system is still saying no. Those people need something different. It’s advocacy, sponsorship, and structural change. It needs hiring managers – probably some of you reading this – to seize the courage to override the filter.

Tailoring your CV isn’t tosh. But neither is being honest about what it can and cannot fix.