You’ve spent hours making sure your CV reflects accurately all your qualifications and experience. You’ve asked someone to read through it to pick up on all the language errors. You have reread it and brought the necessary changes. You even made sure the formatting looks professional and precise. Yet, your CV keeps on being rejected. Why is this the case?
Here are the 4 most important reasons:
1. Ambition
Around one third of job applicants are rejected because of their own ambition. People like to move onwards, upwards and forwards. This means that the last job you had, becomes the floor level of the next job you want. There is nothing wrong with this, but the question becomes, do you have the skills, qualifications and experiences to do the next job upwards?
2. Communication
If you have the required skills, qualifications and experiences to do a job you see advertised, do you have the ability to communicate this to the recruiter or employer? Unfortunately most candidates believe that the recruiter can search through their CV and find the information that shows they have the necessary skills, qualifications and experience. But this rarely happens. You as the job seeker should be showing why you should be chosen for the interview.
3. Clarity
Do you know what you want to do? This seems like a simple question, but from my own experience, more than half of all job seekers suffer from “Any Job Will Do” syndrome, and a third from an unclear next job objective. If you don’t know what you want to do, how can you expect anybody else to know the answer? Let’s not assume (because we all know what that leads to) anything in the job hunting process.
4.Method
Oh, why is this so difficult? If there is one thing that I wish I could change, it would be the way people go about finding work. People employ people. Unfortunately most job seekers have become far too internet reliant, believing that if they spent the whole day posting their CV all over the net, they will surely be lucky sooner or later. This has been working against a lot of job seekers, as a lot of recruiters will reject you after you are found on three or more job sites. Realize that recruiters use more than one site, so the chances of your CV landing on their desk more than once is very good. Nobody wants to interview a desperate job seeker and that might just be the message you are sending out.
The answer for most job seekers when they are rejected is to focus on their CV. It is a tangible asset, and more easily focused on than ambition, communication, personal clarity or method. And of course, focusing on the CV takes the focus off themselves (it’s always easier to push the blame of on something else).
All a poor CV does for the employer or recruiter is to confirm your suitability or not for a particular job.