A few weeks ago, I got on a coaching call with a client, and as soon as she joined, she let out a heavy sigh.
She has 18 years of international leadership experience. She has managed multi-million euro budgets, guided teams through tough reorganizations across three continents, and is easily one of the sharpest people I know.
Then she shared her screen.
She showed me a folder filled with different versions of her CV. She had adjusted each one to fit different job descriptions and had sent out almost 140 applications since Spring!
Total interview invitations? Zero.
When she looked at me and said:
“Kirsten, I feel like my expertise and experience just stopped mattering.“*
My heart broke a little for her.
Deep down, she knows this isn’t true, of course. But by following all the standard advice she found in the online jungle, she had accidentally scrubbed away the very things that would capture a hiring manager’s curiosity and interest in meeting her for a conversation or interview.
The Shortcut Alarm Nobody Warned You About
When AI tools became available, everyone thought:
“Brilliant. I can paste my job history in, ask for an executive tone, present myself as a perfect candidate, and save myself 10 hours of job application stress.”
And it was a welcome shortcut for many busy professionals! But let’s look at what damage this shortcut has done to those doing the selection and recruitment.
Recently, a hiring report caught my eye:
62% of employers admitted they had to fire a new hire in the last year because the person’s real on-the-job skills didn’t match the polished resume they submitted.
Now imagine how this shocking statistic affected the people responsible for hiring.
Thanks to AI, the number of applicants per vacancy has skyrocketed, overwhelming hiring managers and recruiters with hundreds of equally brilliant-sounding applicants within hours of the role going public.
Most of those applicants sound like clones of each other. They all say things like *”strategic visionary who drives cross-functional alignment.”*
When recruiters read application after application that sounds robotic, three things happen:
- They lose interest in less than 10 seconds.
- They doubt if you’re even real, and whether you can truly deliver what you claim you can.
- They become extra cautious, worried about ending up among that 62% who made a bad, expensive hire.
So if your CV sounds too polished and perfect, you don’t look trustworthy. You look like a ‘risky hire’.
Why You’re Often Seen as a ‘Risky Hire’
As someone who has loved the work you did, with 10, 15, or even 25 years of experience, you easily land on that ‘risky hire’ pile.
Especially when you ask AI to polish all the nitty-gritty details of every project or system you’ve worked on or with, and every board you were on, without bridging your experience to the vision and goals of the employer you’re applying to.
Hiring managers get uneasy when they see this polished, yet possibly disconnected, history lesson of your impressive career journey.
What I Tell My Clients to Do Instead
As an experienced professional who highlights everything you did and do in detail, you end up in a big pool with your competitors. To stand out and get noticed, you should hone into a few experiences and bridge them with the potential employer’s vision and goals:
“Here are the two main problems I solve better than most, here is what happened when I did, and here’s what’s in it for you.”
If you’ve been job searching for a while and you feel no one even notices or cares, take a few deep breaths, grab your favourite drink, and take out your laptop.
Open your CV and read the profile summary, if you have one, and the first three bullet points of your most recent job, out loud.
- Would you actually talk about yourself and what you do like this with anyone over a coffee?
- Do the bullet points speak the language of your potential future employer?** Can they relate to, repeat, and remember your story, and even refer you for it?
- Or does your experience sound like something from a shareholder report of your current or past employer?
If it all sounds like previous employer jargon that is difficult to remember, repeat, and refer, it’s time to bring back your real career story by answering these four questions:
- What was actually ‘broken’** when you walked into your previous role(s)?
- What did you do about your project or team** on a memorable Tuesday morning when things went wrong?
- What was better**, because of your efforts, after you left?
- How does all I’ve lived and experienced benefit ‘them’?
For you to make it to an interview, you need to sound like a genuine, capable, and trustworthy human who knows how to solve ‘their problem’ and do the job well.
Moving Forward
I am tired of seeing talented job seekers around the world lose confidence, doubt they’ll ever land a new job again, give up on their aspirations, or settle for a lesser opportunity out of urgency.
If you are in the middle of a career change, feeling invisible in your search, or just wondering why things are tougher this year, you do not have to carry that alone.
Connect & Work Together: Explore how we can work together (https://www.claritycompasscareercoach.com/work-with-me/)
Newsletter: Subscribe to my bi-weekly newsletter, **The Career Reset**, on LinkedIn for modern job search strategies without the application burnout. (https://www.linkedin.com/build-relation/newsletter-follow?entityUrn=7503770845148901376 )
I'm Kirsten, and I help international professionals take control of their story and find the right roles.