Why Am I Not Getting Job Interviews? Start With These 7 Things

If you’re applying for jobs you know you could do and still not getting interviews, it’s very easy to assume the problem is the job market.

Sometimes it is. There are jobs attracting hundreds of applications, employers can afford to be pickier and plenty of very good people are finding job searching harder than they expected.

But “the job market is terrible” doesn’t really help you work out what to do next.

I’ve worked in recruitment for more than 20 years and if somebody told me they’d applied for 50 jobs without getting an interview, I wouldn’t immediately tell them to apply for another 50. I’d want to understand why the first 50 didn’t get anywhere.

Because if there’s a problem somewhere in your approach, increasing the volume just means repeating that problem more often.

1. Start with the jobs you’re applying for

Before touching your CV, look at your targeting.

Are you applying for jobs where there’s a reasonably obvious match between what the employer needs and what you’ve done?

You don’t need to meet every requirement. Job descriptions regularly contain wish lists and employers hire people who don’t tick every box. But there’s a difference between stretching into a slightly bigger role and repeatedly applying for jobs where half of the important experience simply isn’t there.

This is why I think it’s useful to treat your job search as a funnel rather than simply counting applications. I wrote more about that in Your Job Search Has a Conversion Problem.

If you’re getting interviews, something about your targeting and CV is clearly working. If you’re getting absolutely nothing, those are the first two things I’d investigate.

2. Look at whether the important stuff is obvious

Recruiters don’t know you.

That sounds incredibly obvious, but it explains a lot of bad CVs.

You know what you’ve achieved. You know how difficult that project was. You know that everybody in your company comes to you when something goes wrong. You know your job title massively undersells what you actually do.

The recruiter knows whatever you put on the page.

I see plenty of CVs from people who are clearly very good at what they do, but you’d never know it from reading their CV. They’ve listed where they worked, their job title and a collection of responsibilities that could have been copied from the job description.

Nothing tells me whether they were actually any good.

If your strongest evidence is buried on page two, hidden inside a huge paragraph or missing completely because you assumed it was obvious, don’t expect the person reading your CV to fill in the gaps.

3. Stop describing your job and start showing your impact

This is probably one of the most common problems I see.

“Responsible for managing key stakeholders.”

“Managed a team of eight.”

“Responsible for monthly reporting.”

“Supported the delivery of strategic projects.”

None of those things are necessarily bad. I need some context about what you did.

The problem is that thousands of other people with similar jobs could write exactly the same thing.

Your CV needs to help me understand the difference between somebody who occupied the role and somebody who was really good at it.

What changed because you were there? What did you improve? What problems did you solve? What did you deliver? Did you increase something, reduce something, build something, fix something or make something work better?

Not every achievement needs a percentage attached to it. You don’t need to claim you increased stakeholder happiness by 37% because somebody on LinkedIn told you every bullet needs a metric.

You just need evidence of value.

4. Make sure I can understand what you actually do

Internal job titles cause all sorts of problems.

Maybe your company calls you a “Customer Happiness Ninja”, “People Partner”, “Growth Wizard” or some other title somebody invented during a branding workshop.

Everybody inside your company understands it. Nobody outside it has a clue.

The same problem happens when CVs are full of internal acronyms, programme names and terminology that only means something if you already work there.

Your CV shouldn’t require a decoder.

If your title needs explaining, explain it. If an internal term means nothing outside your organisation, translate it. If you work for a company nobody has heard of, give me enough context to understand its size, industry or what it actually does.

Don’t make relevance difficult to spot.

5. Check whether your CV is trying to do too much

A CV doesn’t need to contain everything you’ve ever done.

In fact, trying to include everything often makes the useful stuff harder to find.

If you’ve been working for 20 years, I probably don’t need six bullet points explaining a job you had in 2009 unless that experience is somehow incredibly relevant to the role you want now.

Give the most space to the evidence that helps with the decision somebody is making today.

This is especially important if you’re trying to move into a particular type of role. Your CV should make the case for that move rather than giving every part of your career equal billing because it all happened.

6. Stop obsessing about imaginary ATS scores

I need to include this because there is an enormous amount of nonsense online about ATSs.

There isn’t some universal ATS score where your CV gets 63%, disappears into a computer and never reaches a human because you forgot to use the word “synergy” seven times.

Applicant Tracking Systems are real. Recruiters use them every day. They help companies manage applications, search candidate databases, organise recruitment processes and do lots of other useful things.

That doesn’t mean you should write your CV for a mythical robot.

You should make the relevance of your experience clear because people need to understand it. If a job requires Power BI and you have five years of Power BI experience, put Power BI on your CV. Not because you’re trying to trick an algorithm, but because it’s relevant evidence.

Write for the job. Write for the person making the decision.

7. Work out whether the CV is actually the problem

There’s one final thing I’d check before rewriting everything.

Are you genuinely getting no interviews?

If you’ve applied for 30 jobs and had eight recruiter calls, your CV probably isn’t completely broken. It’s creating enough interest for people to speak to you.

At that point I’d start looking at what happens next. That first recruiter conversation is more important than people realise because the recruiter is deciding whether they’re prepared to put you in front of the hiring manager. I explain exactly what’s happening in The 20-Minute Call That Decides Whether You Ever Meet the Hiring Manager.

But if you’re applying for sensible jobs and getting almost nothing back, your CV absolutely deserves some attention.

The frustrating part is working out what’s wrong with it.

You can stare at your own CV for three hours and still not know what somebody else sees when they open it. You know the person behind the document, so your brain fills in all the context that isn’t actually there.

That’s exactly why I built my Free CV Score.

Upload your CV and it’ll look at the things that matter when somebody is deciding whether to speak to you, so you can see where the problems are before you send another 50 applications.

Score your CV free and find out what might be costing you interviews.