Your CV/resume can be completely accurate and still be wrong for the market you’re applying into.
I see this quite often with experienced professionals who have been with the same company for several years.
Their CV reflects what made them successful in that environment. It shows the responsibilities they were given, the language their company used and the achievements that mattered internally. But when they return to the external job market, they sometimes discover that employers are now looking for something slightly different.
The role may have become more commercial. More strategic. More data-driven. Employers may now expect stronger AI fluency, more evidence of transformation, greater executive influence, or broader cross-functional leadership.
That does not necessarily mean the candidate lacks those capabilities.
Quite often, they have developed them. The problem is that their CV is still telling an older version of their story. And that is why, before rewriting a CV, I often recommend doing some market research first.
Look at 15–20 roles, not two or three
One of the easiest mistakes to make in a job search is to find one attractive job description and start tailoring everything around it.
The problem is that one vacancy tells you what one company wants.
It may have an unusual remit. The hiring manager may have added a long wish list. The title may not match the actual scope of the role. Some job descriptions are excellent, while others are vague, outdated or trying to cover three jobs at once.
Two or three vacancies can still give you a distorted picture.
A better approach is to look at around 15–20 current job descriptions for roles you would genuinely consider.
The sample does not have to be perfect, but try to keep it reasonably consistent.
Look at similar roles, at a similar level of seniority and, where location affects the market, in the same geography.
If you are targeting Director-level B2B marketing roles in London, for example, analysing a mixture of Marketing Manager, VP Marketing, US remote and consumer-brand positions is unlikely to tell you very much.
You are trying to understand the market you are actually entering.
Once you have a reasonable sample, stop looking at each job description as an individual vacancy and start looking for patterns across them.
What keeps appearing?
Ask yourself:
- What capabilities are employers repeatedly asking for?
- What business problems would this person be expected to solve?
- What outcomes are mentioned again and again?
- What seems to matter more now than it did the last time you were job searching?
- Which requirements appear occasionally, and which ones seem to be becoming standard?
This is where AI can be genuinely useful.
You can give it the job descriptions and ask it to identify recurring themes, similar requirements expressed in different language, and areas that appear frequently across the sample.
But I would not simply accept the output.
AI can group things together that should remain separate. It can overstate patterns. It can also introduce assumptions based on what it already knows about a profession rather than what is actually in the job descriptions you supplied.
Use it to help you analyse the evidence, not replace your judgment.
Then check the conclusions yourself.
Now compare the market with your CV
Once you understand what employers are repeatedly asking for, put that next to your current CV.
This is where the exercise becomes useful.
For each important requirement, ask:
Does my CV clearly prove that I can do this?
Not, “Have I done this?”
Not, “Could I talk about this in an interview?”
Does the CV actually show it?
Those are different questions.
For example, perhaps several roles ask for experience influencing senior executives.
You may have spent years presenting recommendations to a leadership team, challenging senior stakeholders and gaining approval for major initiatives.
But your CV says:
“Prepared monthly reports for senior management.”
The experience is there.
The evidence is weak.
Or perhaps several roles emphasise transformation.
You have led a major process redesign, introduced a new operating model and improved productivity across several teams.
But your CV focuses mainly on the day-to-day responsibilities of your role.
Again, the experience exists. Your positioning simply does not reflect it.
I find it useful to put your experience into four categories:
- You have the experience and your CV demonstrates it clearly.
- You have the experience, but the evidence is vague.
- You have the experience, but it is missing from the CV altogether.
- You genuinely do not have the experience.
The last category matters.
A strong CV is not about finding clever wording that makes every requirement appear to fit.
If you genuinely lack something employers consistently want, that is useful information too.
It may tell you that you need to build that skill, gain exposure to it in your current role, or rethink which roles you are targeting.
Do not turn this into a keyword exercise
This is where candidates sometimes go wrong.
They identify recurring terms in job descriptions and then start adding them everywhere.
- “Strategy.”
- “Transformation.”
- “AI.”
- “Stakeholder management.”
- “Commercial.”
But repeating the language of the market does not automatically make a CV stronger.
Employers are not simply looking for nouns.
They are looking for evidence.
If companies repeatedly want someone who can improve commercial performance, your CV becomes stronger when you show what you improved and how.
If they want executive influence, show the decision you helped shape.
If they want transformation experience, explain what changed because of your work.
If they want someone who can use data to make better decisions, show how you used data and what happened as a result.
The market research tells you what to emphasise.
Your experience provides the proof.
Sometimes the problem is not the writing
Candidates often assume that a disappointing response rate means their CV needs better wording.
Sometimes it does. But sometimes the deeper problem is positioning. The document may be professionally written. The achievements may be real. The format may be perfectly fine.
It is simply presenting the candidate against an outdated definition of the role.
That is especially common when someone has been with the same organisation for a long time, is moving into a different sector, or is trying to step into a broader role.
Your previous employer may have valued one set of capabilities. The market you are entering may prioritise another.
That gap is worth understanding before you start rewriting anything.
So before changing your template, adding more keywords or asking AI to “improve” your CV, spend some time studying the roles you actually want.
- Look at 15–20 relevant job descriptions.
- Find the patterns.
- Work out what employers appear to value now.
- Then ask whether your CV clearly proves that you can deliver it.
Sometimes the answer will be yes.
Sometimes you will realise that strong experience has been sitting there all along, but your CV barely mentions it.
And sometimes you will discover that the market has moved further away from your current experience than you realised.
All three answers are useful. Because the goal is not to make your CV sound more impressive. It is to make sure the version of you on the page matches the market you are trying to enter.
I am also pleased to say my blog Interview Coach blog has been included in Feedspot’s Top 25 Job Interview Blogs on the Web for 2026.
I’ve been writing about interviews, recruitment, job search strategy and career positioning for years, so it’s nice to see the blog recognised alongside other resources in this space.
You can see the full list here:
https://bloggers.feedspot.com/job_interview_blogs/?feed_id=4734458&_src=f1_newcampaign#h4734458
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