InterviewHack.ai

Sell yourself with your CV

Turn a list of jobs into a document that gets you called — the recruiter's eye, results over duties, and beating the ATS.

4 modules · 34 min · free

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01 · 8 min

The 7-second scan

A recruiter decides in seconds whether to keep reading. Win that, or nothing else matters.

A recruiter's first pass is a scan, not a read — top third of page one, in an F-shaped path: your most recent title, your current company, then the first bullet under it. If those three don't say "relevant and strong," you're out before your best line is seen.

So front-load. Put your strongest, most relevant proof where the eye lands first. A short headline under your name that names the role you want plus one credential does more than a paragraph of "summary". Everything below the fold is for the humans who already decided you're worth a real read.

  • Recruiters scan the top third first, in an F-shape
  • Your most recent role + first bullet carry the most weight
  • A one-line headline beats a vague 'objective' paragraph
  • Relevance in the first 7 seconds, depth below
  1. 1Name + a one-line headline (target role + top credential)
  2. 2Most recent role, with your single strongest result first
  3. 3Then the rest, in decreasing relevance

Rewrite your headline in one line: what you are + strongest proof + what you're aiming at.

e.g. 'Backend engineer — cut checkout latency 40% at a 2M-user fintech, targeting senior platform roles.' Specific, proof-first, points forward.

Above the fold
The part of page one visible before scrolling — your prime real estate.
Headline
A one-line summary under your name; the first thing read after your title.

02 · 10 min

Results, not duties

The single biggest difference between a CV that gets calls and one that doesn't.

Most CVs list responsibilities: "Responsible for the payments service." That tells the reader your job title, which they already know. It says nothing about whether you were good at it.

Rewrite every bullet as a result: what changed because you were there, ideally with a number. "Responsible for payments" becomes "Cut payment failures 30% by adding idempotent retries, recovering ~$40k/mo." Numbers don't have to be huge — they have to be concrete. Percentages, time saved, money, users, scale. If you truly can't measure it, describe the outcome and the difficulty: "shipped the migration with zero downtime."

  • A duty says what you were assigned; a result says what you changed
  • Lead with the outcome, then how you did it
  • Any number beats no number — %, time, money, scale
  • Verb-first, past tense, no 'responsible for'
  1. 1State the outcome (what got better)
  2. 2Quantify it (%, $, time, users)
  3. 3Name the action/skill that caused it

Take your weakest bullet and rewrite it as: [strong verb] + [outcome with a number] + [how].

'Maintained the API' → 'Cut p95 API latency from 800ms to 210ms by adding caching and query indexes.' Same job, visible impact.

Impact bullet
A line built around a measurable outcome, not a responsibility.

03 · 9 min

Beat the ATS

Most CVs are ranked by software before a human ever sees them. Miss the keywords, get filtered out.

Applicant tracking systems (Workday, Greenhouse, iCIMS) score your CV against the job description by exact keyword match, then a recruiter reads the top of the pile. If the posting says "PostgreSQL" and you wrote "Postgres", or it says "stakeholder management" and you never used the phrase, you rank lower — even if you have the skill.

The fix isn't stuffing. Read the posting, list the exact terms it repeats (tools, methods, the job title), and make sure the ones you honestly have appear in your CV in your real bullets. Aim for strong coverage (~70-80%), not 100% — perfect match reads as gaming. And keep the format machine-readable: real text, standard headings, no tables or text-in-images.

  • ATS ranks by exact keyword match to the posting
  • Mirror the posting's exact terms — where you honestly have them
  • Target ~70-80% coverage, not stuffing
  • Machine-readable format: no tables, columns, or text in images
  1. 1List the exact terms the posting repeats
  2. 2Check which you honestly have
  3. 3Work those into your real bullets, verbatim
  4. 4Keep the layout plain-text and parseable

Paste a target posting next to your CV. How many of its top 10 terms appear in yours?

If under ~7, add the ones you genuinely have — in context, not a keyword dump. That alone can lift you above the fold.

ATS
Applicant Tracking System — software that parses and ranks CVs before humans.
Keyword coverage
Share of the posting's key terms that appear in your CV.

04 · 7 min

One CV per job

A generic CV competes everywhere and wins nowhere.

You don't need to rewrite your CV from scratch each time — you need to re-aim it. Keep a master CV with everything, then for each application cut and reorder so the most relevant experience is on top and the posting's language is mirrored.

The highest-leverage edits: the headline (match the target title), the order of bullets under each role (relevant first), and which projects you include. Ten minutes of tailoring beats a beautiful generic CV, because relevance is what both the ATS and the recruiter reward.

  • Keep one master CV, tailor a copy per role
  • Re-aim, don't rewrite: headline, bullet order, which projects
  • Mirror the posting's title and terms
  • Relevance on top beats completeness
  1. 1Start from your master CV
  2. 2Match the headline to the target title
  3. 3Reorder bullets so relevant ones lead
  4. 4Drop what doesn't serve this role

For a real posting, what three edits would most raise your relevance?

Usually: headline to the exact title, surface the two most on-point results, and add 2-3 missing exact keywords you truly have.

Now do it for your real interview

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