Your Career Questions,
Answered
Career Compass
You start by figuring out what you can, want and need to do. Do this before jumping blindly into searching for a job and your job search will become focused with intention. Complete our 'Get Started/Career Compass' exercise to discover what this means for you.
Reputation Exercise
We've added a bonus exercise to help you identify and reveal the professional 'Reputation Exercise' you create and have at work. Your answers in this exercise will be useful when considering which roles to apply for, or what questions to ask at interview. These are great interview questions, consider now how you will answer them and potentially fit them into your CV and/or cover letter.
Brag Log
It's fundamentally important (and fun) to remember all your recent achievements and accolades, and record these in your personal Brag Log. Don't worry, we have developed an exercise to help you remember these.
No. We don't write your CV! To us that's madness. You need to own your career story and be able to speak to it at interview. What we will do is coach you through our CV Building process and this will help you overcome your Career Amnesia.
Why this matters
When you recall what you did and how you impacted outcomes/added value:
- You build self-awareness and confidence in your unique story.
- Your CV becomes authentic, rooted in your unique experience and skills you can confidently speak to.
- You gain clarity on what you want next, and what you don't, making your job search intentional, not just reactive.
- Then you show up to interviews prepared, due to this self-awareness and confidence.
A warning on AI-generated CVs
No plagiarism, AI duplication or hallucinations here.*
*Increasingly we see recruiters/hiring managers complaining about the volume of CV they receive with "exactly the same narrative or skillset" clearly exposing inauthentic use of AI and untrustworthy candidates.
CV writing is daunting because nobody teaches you how to do it (until now). It's often difficult to get started as it's a struggle to remember what you did, when, where, how, and importantly, the impact you made. This struggle is what we call Career Amnesia.
How we help
At MashalCareers, we've got you! We have decades of recruitment experience, from both sides of the table and we've written AI agents to build a step-by-step CV Builder tool (coming soon). This will enable you to produce a 'Master CV'. This not only prepares you to speak confidently at interview, but your Master CV will become the golden source of all future CV applications.
Your Master CV is your full unedited story. This contains all your behavioral and technical skills, your full career history, education and training and will be your weapon to combat Career Amnesia forming the basis of subsequent aligned CVs and vitally, your interview prep (the key reason why we won't write your CV for you).
Your Master CV becomes the golden source for Recruitment Agents, LinkedIn and all future job or company specific, aligned CVs.
What it assesses
In MashalCareers, our recruiter-trained AI offers 'critical but supportive' advice following assessment of your CV. Just like a human recruiter, MashalCareers AI will assess your CV for behavioral and technical skills, experience, education/training, responsibility level, job title/profession, length/volume of experience and any references to quantifiable impacts (%, £, metrics). It also assesses how well constructed your CV is, in terms of structure, grammar, spelling and clarity.
Where it identifies weaknesses, it will make recommendations for improvements.
You decide
But this is your story so you decide what recommendations to work on, if any.
MashalCareers will help you recall experience you've forgotten or identify where you need to start your up-skilling journey. The final decision is always yours. Never make a change which is not truthful.
Now you're ready
With improved self-awareness of what you can, want and need to do, and with a strong CV to represent your story, you're ready to make an intentional move into the job market and the rest of your career.
Why aligning matters
One size does not fit all - each employer will have specific requirements (background, actions/duties to be performed, skills and strengths required and approach/personality preferred) in their Job Specification, which your Master CV may not address sufficiently.
How the Job Matcher works
Upload the job spec (Word, PDF, Text) or the URL for the role you're interested in, to the Job Matcher function along with your most preferred version of your CV (no tables remember). Run the Job Matcher feature for analysis. MashalCareers will make optimisation recommendations based on the job specification and/or the known ATS for you to selectively apply to a aligned CV.
Stay truthful
Remember you must remain truthful. We hear recruiters reporting DAILY how they have received many CVs with the same AI generated narrative... straight to the bin. We're also seeing career portals stating that if plagiarism is detected the CV will be removed from the selection process.
Again, MashalCareers won't write your aligned CV for you but it will make recommendations on how to align your CV. This is your story, so you decide what recommendations to work on, if any.
YES, if you want to compete. Recruiters can only assess what's on the CV presented, no inferences, no suppositions. So, you need to align your application CV to match to the job spec, and make the match unmistakable (right to work, job title relevance, skills, experience, sector fit, education, outcomes, evidence). The closer the match the better your odds of an interview. "Odds", because there's never a guarantee, someone else might simply be a stronger match. Aligning is competing. You can tilt the odds in your favour with a bit of focused effort.
Be careful
Aligning must be honest. Inflate the truth and you'll be exposed at interview and yes, it's as awkward as it sounds. If you don't align, assume other candidates will and they'll likely bump you off the interview shortlist.
Bonus: aligning is a reality check
Once you've tried to match the spec, step back and ask, "Is this genuinely a match to me, am I missing any of the must-haves?" If you can't truthfully evidence the match, you could:
- Give it a try - highlight education, training, or informal experience addressing the gap but keep your expectations of an interview low
- Decide if it's a not-right-now, or ever
- If not-right-now, upskill with a targeted course and try again in the future
- Add this course as 'on-going' in your CV and give that a try (number 1)
Many employers are now stating: "even if you don't meet all these criteria, we'd love to hear from you". Maybe you're in a particularly niche area and 'a close match' is good enough, but do not pin your hopes on this!
Our Job Matcher & Aligning feature will give you advice on what you can do.
Ok this is where it can get a bit emotional. You're keen on a role but your 'data' is not a match to the must-haves on the job specification. Objectively you need to step back and ask yourself, 'do I have the must-have skills to do this job to compete with other candidates for this role?'
If the answer is YES
Then review your CV again for information you must be missing and get it in!
If the answer is NO
Your choices are to:
- Give it a try - highlight education, training, or informal experience addressing the gap but keep your expectations of an interview low
- Decide if it's a not-right-now, or ever
- If not-right-now, upskill with a targeted course and try again in the future
- Add this course as 'on-going' in your CV and give that a try (number 1)
Many employers are now stating: "even if you don't meet all these criteria, we'd love to hear from you". Maybe you're in a particularly niche area and 'a close match' is good enough, but do not pin your hopes on this!
Stage 1: ATS
Most companies use a two-stage screen. First, an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) parses your CV for keywords, qualifications, and formatting. If your CV passes, a recruiter then reviews it - typically spending 6-8 seconds on their first scan.
Stage 2: Human review
Recruiters are often reviewing hundreds of applications per role. They're dealing with time pressure, vague job briefs, and a high volume of CVs that don't clearly communicate the candidate's fit.
Understanding this helps you as a candidate. A CV that's clear, well-structured, and immediately shows relevance makes the recruiter's job easier - and makes you more likely to get the call. You're not just competing with other candidates; you're competing with the recruiter's attention span.
The takeaway
Both structure and content matter. Clean formatting gets you past the ATS. Clear, impactful achievements keep the recruiter reading.
What it does
An ATS is an Applicant Tracking System. Tracking, that's what they're set up to do. For years these IT systems have been used by organisations to complete the basic admin tasks of the recruitment process. Once you upload your CV to a company portal, their ATS will extract (parse) your CV data to build your candidate profile in its database.
Knockout questions
Some recruiters will have programmed the ATS to 'auto reject' candidates against their 'knockout questions'. These are things like right to work in the country, salary expectation. Legal requisites. Imagine, the unpublished salary for a role you are applying to is £75K base and you state you are looking for £95K. Your CV isn't going to progress as per the knockout question, and unless the recruiter has programmed the ATS further, you won't get a notification and will probably feel ghosted.
Tips
Plain Text Extraction: We can confirm that "hiding" keywords in white font doesn't work; the recruiter sees the extracted text, including the hidden words, as these are extracted by the ATS into plain text. But you're using this to fix a problem that doesn't exist - the ATS isn't screening you out if you are lacking keywords. This is an own goal.
Formatting Risks: Because the system parses text, complex formatting can cause errors. For instance, systems like Workday may struggle to read your CV if you have multiple columns or tables, potentially causing data to be lost.
As per the formatting risk mentioned in the preceding answer, this is a common issue. Many ATS systems cannot read content placed inside headers or footers. The information is technically there in your document, but it's invisible to the parsing software.
The fix
Move your name, email, phone, and LinkedIn into the main body of your CV - right at the top. This ensures both ATS systems and recruiters can find your contact details immediately.
An ATS Match Score is sold to firms as a measure of how well a CV matched to a job spec. This is marketing hype as they are not that clever and recruiters don't use them (if they're produced) preferring to screen CVs personally, relying on their own judgement.
The danger of "ATS optimisation"
If you've been told to optimise your CV for an ATS system, realise this is from someone who has bought in to the hype. Optimising your CV for an automatised decision-maker which doesn't exist will ruin your CV. Candidates often remove unique, credible achievements to stuff in generic keywords found in the job description and/or stuff in keywords diluting their story and making their CV harder for a human to review and spot your value. You end up with a resume that is "ATS compliant" (according to a fake metric) but not "reader compliant" (easy for a human to understand).
The reasons: no legal right to work in the country, insufficient recent relevant experience/skills/qualifications, salary expectations that exceed the role's range or they have clearly used AI to generate their CV (as there's another dozen with exactly the same narrative).
The 5% who get through
The 5% screened-in when found are afforded more thorough analysis and only the 'top-matches' are offered the interview slots. That's the gate you're trying to get through.
This matters because you should never be put off applying for a role when you see that it's already received dozens of applications. The vast majority of these will be eliminated from the process very quickly.
All recruiters are incredibly busy! Whether they're recruitment agents trying to make fee-earning placements, or they're hiring managers building/maintaining a team in parallel with doing their 'day-job', screening CVs is a chore which they turn into triage. And typically, they only have time for a few interview slots. Their job is to fill the role, not find you a job.
What they scan for
Those who screen CVs can only assess what's on the CV presented, no inferences, no suppositions and with time constraints, they will rarely afford you the benefit of the doubt. Your fit and ability to solve their hiring problem must be unmissable.
They will visually and/or digitally scan the first page, (maybe page 2), focusing on the last 5-10 years looking for metrics and experience which allows them to infer that you are potentially a good fit/low risk to go through to the next phase.
The signals that keep them reading
Do you have the legal right to work, relevant job title, skills, experience, scope, sector fit, education, and proof of impact (outcomes/metrics). These are signals in your CV that keep the recruiter reading. If those first seconds look promising, they'll read deeper. If not, they move on. Your CV's top third is prime real estate - make it count.
Note: Research has shown that if you give three recruiters the same 100 unnamed CVs five days in a row, they do not shortlist the same top 10 candidates in the exact same order each day, because their subjective assessment is not consistent. Bringing us back again to aligning your CV. This is a must to improve the probability of you being shortlisted for interview.
The reality
Recruitment agents get a bad rep. We've done the job and know it's not easy. They're targeted by KPIs, and none of those say, "got [name] a job". They're genuinely time-poor as their focus is on these quantitative KPIs not qualitative relationships, typically.
The system working against them
Client-side ATS portals have eroded their relationship with hiring managers. Jobs are shared via portals with limited requirements and scant detail on culture, team fit, or what "good" looks like. They don't get to make a 'person fit' so they are forced to attempt a data match (Job Spec to CV).
The result
That first pass can surface what the hiring manager really wants, but it creates churn: roles get re-posted because the right candidate wasn't sourced. Top this off with hiring managers ghosting recruiters and not providing feedback on CVs, even after interviews. It's inefficient and creates a poor experience and lots of lost time for recruiters, candidates, and hiring managers.