One afternoon in London, I sat down on a bench for a brief moment to breathe. A few minutes later, two young professionals—sharp suits, sleek dresses, the unmistakable high-end corporate uniform—sat right beside me. For five minutes, without trying to eavesdrop (they were far too loud to ignore), I listened to them talk shop.
They were in their early twenties, likely on a graduate scheme coming to an end, debating their CVs, next moves, and how to jump to something “bigger and better.” A small, wry part of my ego flickered: If only they knew who was sitting next to them. But being a humble nobody these days, I just smiled to myself. When one of them playfully muttered something about putting headphones on so people wouldn’t listen, I thought, You joined my bench, and you’re projecting across the street!
Underneath the bravado, though, I loved hearing their ambition—and I recognised their struggle instantly. They spoke about applying everywhere, working brutal hours, trying to prove themselves in a hyper-competitive market. The young man was being supportive, telling her, “You’ve got way more experience than me with big-name brands,” but she was visibly anxious.
What struck me most was what was missing from their five-minute conversation. Not once did either of them ask: “What do I actually want? What kind of life do I want this job to support?”
It was all about the hustle, the competition, and fitting into someone else’s box. That exchange reminded me of a harsh truth: whether you’re just starting out in a sharp suit or returning from medical leave years later, you can have every credential on paper or absolutely nothing—but if you don’t know what you need, and if you can’t align with a company that actually cares, you will struggle. You will burn out.
Which brings me to writing this piece for you all today. Whether you’re sitting at a desk, perched on a park bench like those two, or talking through your next move with a friend, we all eventually reach a point where we need a different perspective, some real answers, and a bit of grounded expertise. For over 25 years, as a career specialist spanning employment and self-employment, I’ve worked behind the scenes helping people navigate the system, reclaim their value, and succeed. But expertise doesn't make you immune to the toll the system takes—and returning to work after a long period of medical leave brought every single one of those lessons home.
Today’s UK Context: Beyond the Corporate Noise
The current job market is tough, and the overwhelming volume of online career advice often makes it worse. Every platform offers conflicting instructions: rewrite your CV, hack the software, build a brand, or network endlessly. When you are simply trying to secure a stable role or make a necessary career change, that noise is unhelpful.
After two decades as a qualified careers adviser and employment specialist across the UK public and private sectors, working with everyone from senior managers to long-term jobseekers, I know that people do not need superficial “hacks”. They need clear context, practical guidance, and an honest view of how recruitment actually works.
Below are the five questions people search for most, with what is really going on behind each one. Where published research exists, I have named it. Where I am drawing on what I have seen across two decades of working with jobseekers, I say so.
1. “Why am I not getting interviews?”
(The reality: a job search is a project, and most people treat it like a lottery ticket)
When application after application brings silence, it is natural to assume your skills are the problem. Sometimes the market really is that competitive. But in my experience the most common cause is simpler, and far more within your control: the search itself is not being run as a process.
1. Applications aren’t tailored. This is the one I see most. A 2021 Prospects Luminate (Jisc) report found that over half of the employers surveyed (53%) named “applications not tailored to the role” as a common problem, the most frequently cited issue, ahead of poorly written applications (38%) [1]. It is not a new problem either: a 2012 webrecruit jobseeker survey found only around 30% of jobseekers always tailored their CV [2].
2. One-click applications and job boards are a low-return route on their own. Easy-apply buttons make it effortless to send fifty applications in an evening, but they are effortless for everyone else too. The data points the same way. CareerPlug’s analysis of more than 60,000 small and mid-sized US businesses found that job boards produced 61% of applications but only 42% of hires in 2024, while company career sites produced 13% of applicants but 26% of hires, and referrals delivered an outsized share of hires too [3]. That is US data, but the principle matters: the channel with the most volume is not the channel with the best odds. Going direct to employers you have researched usually beats joining the biggest queue.
3. Many people apply without a clear target. “I’ll take anything” reads as exactly that. A 2025 Totaljobs survey of 624 UK recruiters found that candidates are most often rejected early for a lack of relevant skills (70% of applications) or relevant experience (58%) [4]. My reading of that is that many applications go to roles that were never a good fit, which is exactly what a targeted search avoids. Totaljobs’ own conclusion was that quality beats quantity [4].
4. There is no research behind the search. The people who get results decide what they want, identify the companies they would like to work for, learn how that market works, and approach it deliberately. They treat the search like any other project: a goal, research, a plan and sustained effort. Most people want the result without putting that time in. It is a bit like wanting a car or a home without saving for it, or wanting an A* without studying. The outcome follows the effort, and there is no shortcut to the effort.
I have also noticed that how applicants understand the systems handling their applications is a big factor. That deserves its own edition, so I will cover applicant tracking systems (ATS) separately.
A question worth asking before you apply: do I actually want this job?
Work is the biggest single use of our waking lives. 80,000 Hours, a UK-founded careers research charity, estimates a typical career at around 80,000 hours (40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year, for 40 years), and points out that this is more time than most people will spend eating, socialising and watching TV put together [5]. It is an illustrative estimate, not a precise national figure, but the scale is the point.
Given that, it is worth asking whether you want the role, or whether you can simply do the skill and will accept whatever the employer is offering. In my experience I can usually tell when someone doesn’t want the job they are applying for. It comes through in the CV, the cover letter and the interview. And where an employer does use filters or keyword searches, a generic application written for no role in particular is the one least likely to match [6].
That is not a criticism. It is a signal. If you can’t explain why you want a particular role, the application will struggle, and the job might not be right for you either.
I haven’t kept a count of the people I have worked with over twenty years. I don’t need one. These patterns repeat so consistently that I trust them.
2. “Is my CV bad?”
(The reality: clarity matters far more than formatting trends)
Candidates often worry endlessly about templates, fonts and layout trends. In reality, recruiters want efficiency and clarity above all else.
The most effective CVs drop corporate buzzwords and clearly communicate three things:
What you have done (core duties and scope of responsibility).
The concrete problems you have solved (achievements, improvements, revenue or cost figures).
How your skills apply (direct alignment with the essential requirements of the job description).
You may have heard that recruiters spend “6 seconds” on a CV. That figure comes from eye-tracking studies by the US job site The Ladders: about 6 seconds in 2012, rising to 7.4 seconds in 2018 [7]. Treat it with care. Critics note that the 2018 report gives little detail about how the study was run [8], and a 2024 CV Genius survey of 625 UK hiring managers disputed the 7-second claim [9]. The lesson that does hold up is simple: first impressions are quick, and layouts that are easy to scan (clear headings, job titles, dates and short statements) make it easier for a recruiter to see your value.
Most people do not have a “bad” CV. They understate what they actually did, and they don’t turn their day-to-day results into clear statements of value.
3. “Did an automated system (ATS) reject me?”
(The reality: technology is an administrative tool, and people set the rules)
There is a lot of misinformation online about applicant tracking systems.
They are almost universal in large organisations. Jobscan’s annual research has found a detectable ATS at roughly 97% to 99% of Fortune 500 companies every year since 2018 [10]. Note that this is a US list and the research comes from a vendor, but it shows how standard these systems are.
The “75% auto-rejected by a robot” claim is a myth. A study reported by IT Brief UK found that the widely repeated claim that most CVs are rejected by an ATS before a human sees them was not supported by recruiters’ experience [11].
Humans still set the filters. Jobscan’s survey of 384 recruiters found that almost all of them (99.7%) use filters within their ATS or similar system [12]. So the system isn’t deciding for itself, but a recruiter may well be narrowing a large pile using the criteria they chose, often knockout questions such as the right to work in the UK or a required qualification.
The aim is not to trick a computer program. It is to make your experience and the role’s key terms clear enough that both the filter and the human behind it can quickly confirm you are suitable. I will go into this in much more detail in the dedicated ATS edition.
4. “How do I change careers without starting from scratch?”
(The reality: your core skills travel with you)
Changing fields or leaving an unsustainable working environment can feel overwhelming, particularly if you assume a new direction means abandoning your existing experience.
Core skills transfer across sectors:
Stakeholder management and communication: valued in almost every mid-to-senior role, public or private.
Problem-solving and analysis: carries equal weight in government, charity and corporate settings.
Adaptability and organisation: critical in any industry.
A career change is not about starting from zero. It is about repositioning what you already do so a new employer can see how it applies to them. This draws on what I have seen working with career changers; I have deliberately not quoted a “percentage of people who change career” figure, because I could not find a reliable UK source for one.
5. “I don’t have the experience listed on the job description”
(The reality: job descriptions are wish lists, not absolute barriers)
Many capable professionals don’t apply for roles because they lack one or two requirements.
You may have seen the claim that men apply when they meet 60% of the criteria while women apply only at 100%. That figure came from an internal Hewlett Packard report [13]. Tara Sophia Mohr then surveyed more than 1,000 professionals for the Harvard Business Review (2014) and found that the main reason people held back was not low confidence. It was a mistaken belief about the hiring process: that the listed qualifications are strict requirements and that applying without meeting them is a waste of time [13].
In my experience, job descriptions often combine the genuine essentials with an idealised wish list, and candidates who meet most of the essential criteria are regularly interviewed and hired. Instead of judging a role only by what you can do on day one, look at your trajectory. If you have the core competencies, secondary gaps can often be closed through onboarding, training or self-directed learning.
A Note on Workplace Health and Neurodivergence
Much of the standard career advice online assumes a uniform, linear progression and traditional working styles. It rarely accounts for neurodivergence, executive dysfunction, chronic stress, or recovery from unsupportive workplace cultures.
Neurodiversity in the workforce: Acas, the UK’s workplace advice body, says around 1 in 7 people in the UK are neurodivergent, including people with autism, ADHD, dyslexia and dyspraxia [14].
Legal protections: The Equality Act 2010 requires employers to make reasonable adjustments for disabled workers, and neurodivergence will often amount to a disability under the Act [15].
Understanding how your working style, health or neurotype affects your performance gives you a framework for choosing environments that suit your strengths, and for setting boundaries that prevent burnout.
A Practical Perspective Moving Forward
If you are weighing up your next career move, shift your focus from application tactics to fundamentals:
Decide what you want. Know the type of role, and the kind of employer, before you apply.
Research the market. Identify target companies, understand what they hire for, and approach them deliberately.
Choose quality over volume. A small number of well-researched, tailored applications beats a large number of generic ones.
Identify your transferable value. Show how your past problem-solving addresses an employer’s immediate needs.
Take the long view. Sustainable progression comes from deliberate effort and informed positioning, not overnight shortcuts.
Focus on what you can control, put the same effort into your search that you would put into any project that matters, and approach the market with a long-term strategy.
Sources
Prospects Luminate (Jisc), Improving graduate job applications, August 2021. https://luminate.prospects.ac.uk/improving-graduate-job-applications
webrecruit Jobseeker Survey, reported by Recruiter magazine, 2012. https://recruiter.co.uk/news/2012/09/untailored-cvs-remain-majority
CareerPlug research (60,000+ US small and mid-sized businesses, 2024 data), reported by StaffingHub and CareerXroads, April 2026. https://community.cxr.works/blogs/rachel-noto/2026/04/23/careerplug-research-finds-job-boards-provide-more
Totaljobs, survey of 624 UK recruiters and 1,009 jobseekers, March 2025 (published May 2025). https://www.totaljobs.com/recruiter-advice/how-recruiters-define-application-quality-and-why-improving-it-can-lead-to-better-faster-hires
80,000 Hours, Career guide: Why read this guide? and Make a difference with your career. https://80000hours.org/career-guide/introduction and https://80000hours.org/key-ideas-2023/make-a-difference-with-your-career/
Jobscan, State of the Job Search (recruiter use of ATS filters). https://www.jobscan.co/state-of-the-job-search
The Ladders, Eye-Tracking Study, 2018; HR Dive coverage. https://www.hrdive.com/news/eye-tracking-study-shows-recruiters-look-at-resumes-for-7-seconds/
ERE Media, Is the 6-second resume scan a myth? https://www.ere.net/articles/is-the-6-second-resume-scan-a-myth
CV Genius, 2024 CV & Cover Letter Trends Survey (625 UK hiring managers), reported by Digit. https://www.digit.fyi/?p=101047
Jobscan, Fortune 500 Use Applicant Tracking Systems (annual ATS usage report). https://www.jobscan.co/blog/fortune-500-use-applicant-tracking-systems/
IT Brief UK, Study reveals ATS rarely auto-rejects CVs, debunks 75% myth. https://itbrief.co.uk/story/study-reveals-ats-rarely-auto-rejects-cvs-debunks-75-myth
Jobscan, State of the Job Search (survey of 384 recruiters). https://www.jobscan.co/state-of-the-job-search
Tara Sophia Mohr, Why Women Don’t Apply for Jobs Unless They’re 100% Qualified, Harvard Business Review, 25 August 2014. https://hbr.org/2014/08/why-women-dont-apply-for-jobs-unless-theyre-100-qualified
Acas, Neurodiversity at work. https://www.acas.org.uk/neurodiversity-at-work
Acas, Neurodiversity at work presentation and guidance (Equality Act 2010). https://www.acas.org.uk/neurodiversity-at-work