Having screened well over a thousand CVs, I can tell you exactly what a screener's eyes do with yours.
Name, half a second. Current title and company, two seconds. A skim down the left edge for shapes: titles, companies, dates, gaps. Then the decision: read properly, or next. The eye-tracking research (the well-known Ladders study) puts initial screening at 7.4 seconds, and having lived it with two hundred in the pile, I believe every decimal.
Most CVs are written for a reader who doesn't exist: someone with ten patient minutes. The rebuild below writes for the reader who does. I teach it as two-layer writing.
Layer one: survive the skim
The skim reads shapes and snags on specifics. The single highest-value change on any CV is therefore numbers on page one. "Cut supplier costs £340k in 18 months." "Took retention from 71% to 89%." Numbers stop the skim because they can't be pattern-matched into wallpaper; they had to come from somewhere real.
The audit is brutal and takes one minute: count the quantified claims on your page one. Under four, and you know tonight's work. For each bullet, the generating question is: what changed because I did this, and can I count it? Money, time, percentage, volume, headcount. Roles that quantify awkwardly still quantify: "handled 40 client queries a week at 98% same-day resolution" beats "managed client relationships" from every angle.
While you're there, delete the summary that says nothing. "Results-driven professional passionate about delivering excellence through collaborative stakeholder engagement" describes an accountant, a project manager and a zookeeper equally, which means it describes nobody, and screeners' eyes slide straight off it. Replace it with one specific line aimed at the target role: "Operations lead, 8 years in regulated logistics, specialist in supplier turnarounds: 3 delivered, £700k recovered." That summary survives the skim because it's made of the same material as the numbers below it.
Layer two: survive the read
The skim earns the read; the read earns the call. Layer two is where your detail lives: the scope of each role, the how behind the headline numbers, the progression logic between jobs. Write it after layer one is solid, and write it knowing it only gets read at all if layer one worked. Most people write only layer two, painstakingly, and layer two never gets reached.
The channel warning
A rebuilt CV in a dead channel still loses. The document is roughly 20 per cent of interview rate; how it arrives is the rest (day 10's witness list is the delivery system, and day 35 shows the full failure case of polishing the letter while ignoring the letterbox). Rebuild once, properly, then stop touching it and go work the channel.
Why this compounds
The two-layer discipline turns out to be general. Board papers, project updates, the Friday note (day 8): everything you write professionally has a skim audience and a read audience, and the writers who serve both get read by both. Learn it on the CV, then notice you're using it everywhere.
Your assignment
Run the page-one number count on your CV tonight. Whatever the count, you know the fix: one generating question per bullet, one specific summary line, done in an evening.
Talk soon, Yasar
P.S. The Lab's R-shape CV framework is this rebuild as a guided system. Members run it before every application: https://ovdlab.com/for
