How to Get Hired When You're Bad at CVs

Because the CV format only has room for what you were *called*, not what you *did*. It gives you one line per job — title, company, dates — and everything you actually learned has to be squeezed into bullet points underneath, competing with everyone who is better at writing bullet points.

This hurts specific people badly and predictably: anyone who grew sideways into work outside their title, anyone with side projects that taught them more than their job did, anyone who changed field, and anyone who finds writing about themselves excruciating.

None of those are ability problems. They are format problems. You are being filtered on a document skill that has almost nothing to do with the work.

Produce evidence and let it speak. The sequence:

1. Describe what you actually did, in plain language. Not "leveraged cross-functional synergies." Something like: *"I was hired as a backend engineer but ended up running the roadmap for our AI features — I ran the customer interviews, wrote the specs, and decided what we shipped."* That sentence contains three recognised, in-demand skills. You do not have to know their names.

2. Let a translator name the skills. The point is not to make you sound better — it is to map what you said onto skills employers are actually searching for. Seeing your own words come back labelled *Product Discovery* is usually the moment people realise they have been underselling themselves for years.

3. Convert the claims into proof. A claim is what a CV is: unverified assertion. Take one challenge — 60 to 90 minutes — and the claim becomes something an employer can check.

4. Share the proof, not the CV. A page that shows verified skills with the work attached does a job the CV cannot: it lets a stranger check you were telling the truth.

This is the most common situation we see, and it is exactly what proof is for. If you did product work under an engineering title, the CV screen sees *Engineer* and stops. It does not matter how well you write the bullet points; the title is the filter.

Proof routes around it. When an employer sorts candidates by demonstrated skill, you appear next to people with the right title — ranked on the same evidence. Employers on skills-based platforms actively look for this pattern, because a candidate who can do the work without having held the title is usually available and usually underpriced.

For skill-based assessment, yes — sometimes more than a job does, because you made every decision yourself instead of inheriting them.

The catch is that on a CV a side project is just another unverified claim, and employers discount it heavily because they cannot tell a weekend tutorial follow-along from a system that ran for a year. Verification removes the discount. Once the skill is proven, the project becomes context for a proof rather than a claim asking to be believed.

Describing what you did: about ten minutes. Reviewing the skills that come back: five. One challenge: 60–90 minutes, once.

After that the proof is permanent and portable. You do it once and it counts for every employer, rather than rewriting a CV for each application and hoping this one reads better.

You see the result first and choose whether to publish it. A weak result is private and retakeable; it is not a permanent mark. The rubric is published before you start, so you know exactly what is being scored — no hidden criteria and no trick questions.

It is also worth knowing what the rubrics reward, because it surprises people: naming what you would *not* do, saying what the data cannot support, and stating how you would check you were right. Those are habits, not knowledge. If you have them, you will score better than you expect.