There's a famous study from a few years ago that put eye-tracking software on recruiters reviewing CVs. The headline finding still holds: in the first pass, a recruiter spends about six seconds on each CV before deciding whether to keep reading.
Six seconds. That's enough time to scan your name, your most recent role, your job titles, and the top of your summary. Everything else only matters if those six seconds earn you a second look.
Where recruiters actually look
The eye-tracking maps are remarkably consistent. Recruiters look at:
- Your name and current title (the top 3cm of the page).
- The job title and dates of your most recent role.
- The first 1–2 lines of your summary, if you have one.
- Company names down the left margin.
If those zones don't tell a clear story in six seconds, the rest of your CV is wasted. Front-load the page accordingly.
ATS optimisation, without the snake oil
Before a human sees your CV, an Applicant Tracking System usually scores it. You don't need to game the ATS — you just need to not break it. Three rules cover 90% of cases:
- Use a single-column layout. Two-column "creative" CVs frequently get parsed into nonsense.
- Use standard section headings: Experience, Education, Skills. Cute names like "My Journey" confuse parsers.
- Match the language of the job description. If they say "product manager," don't write "product lead." Mirror their words exactly where it's accurate.
PDFs are fine. Text-based PDFs (exported from Word or Google Docs) parse correctly. Image-based PDFs and design tool exports often don't.
The biggest formatting mistakes
- Three pages when two would do. Length isn't strength — it's noise.
- Tiny font (under 10pt) or massive font (over 12pt for body).
- Justified text. It creates uneven spacing that hurts skimmability.
- Photos. Outside specific industries and geographies, they get ignored at best and bias decisions at worst.
- Tables, text boxes, and headers/footers — all of which tend to break in ATS parsing.
Why your summary paragraph matters most
If you make one change today, make it this one. The two or three lines under your name are the most-read part of your CV. Treat them like a headline.
A weak summary says: "Experienced professional with a passion for solving problems and a track record of success." Translation: nothing.
A strong summary says: "Senior product manager with eight years scaling B2B SaaS products from $1M to $50M ARR. Specialised in pricing, enterprise GTM, and zero-to-one launches." Translation: I am exactly who you're looking for.
Tailoring vs. templating
Templates are for the structure of your CV — the bones. Tailoring is for the muscle. You should have one master CV with every role, every metric, and every project documented in detail. From that master, you build a tailored version for each application by trimming what doesn't apply and rewording what does.
This sounds like a lot of work. In practice, once your master is solid, tailoring takes five to ten minutes. The summary changes. The top role's bullets get re-ordered. The skills section is rewritten to mirror the posting. Everything else stays.
What hiring managers actually want to see
Numbers. Specifics. Verbs. Hiring managers don't want to read about responsibilities — they want to read about outcomes. The difference looks like this:
- Weak: Responsible for managing the email marketing programme.
- Strong: Rebuilt the email programme from scratch, lifting open rates from 12% to 31% and adding $1.4M in attributed revenue in one year.
If you can't put a number on a bullet, ask yourself: what changed because I was there? What was true after that wasn't true before? Even a soft metric ("reduced onboarding time by half", "shipped the first version in six weeks") beats a vague description of duties.
The quiet test
Print your CV. Hand it to a friend in a different industry. Give them six seconds, then take it back. Ask them what you do, where, and what you're best at. If they can't answer all three, your top section needs work.
That six-second test is the same one a recruiter will run on Tuesday morning at 9:14am with a coffee in their hand. Pass it, and the rest of the page gets a chance.
Let Bernese handle your job search while you prep for interviews.
Discovery, applications, and offer coaching — done quietly, in the background.
