You’re applying and hearing nothing back

Before you spend money fixing anything, find out which of four things is actually going wrong.

Forty applications. Possibly more. A handful of automated acknowledgements, and then silence — no feedback, no interviews, no explanation.

The hardest part is not the rejection. It is not being able to tell whether the problem is your CV, your targeting, the market, or something you cannot see from where you are standing. So people either give up, or spend money fixing the wrong thing.


There are only four reasons

Three of them are fixable in a fortnight.

It never reaches a human

Eighty-eight per cent of employers admit their applicant tracking software screens out qualified candidates before a person sees them. A document formatted for the human eye — columns, tables, graphics, headers — is frequently unreadable to a parser. If this is your problem, you are not being rejected. You are not being read.

It does not land in 7.4 seconds

That is the average time a recruiter spends on a first pass of an executive resume. If your opening third does not establish your level, the scope you have carried and the evidence behind it, the remaining pages are not reached. Most senior CVs bury their strongest material on page two.

Wrong level, or wrong angle

Forty-one people now apply for every advertised role in Australia, and volumes are up forty-four per cent year on year. At that density, a near miss looks exactly like a bad application — silence either way. Targeting matters more than it did five years ago, not less.

Fishing only where everyone else is

A significant share of executive appointments are never advertised at all. If advertised roles are your only channel, you have chosen to compete in the most crowded part of the market. This is the one that takes longest to fix, and the one most people never address.

Find out which one is yours. Free.

A diagnosis before a decision — whether or not you ever engage us.


Get my free resume review

What the review actually tells you


  • A senior writer, not software

    Your resume is read by an experienced Australian executive writer and scored against the ten criteria that decide executive shortlists.

  • A written scorecard in three business days

    Not a sales call. A document that tells you plainly what is working, what is not, and which of the four problems above is the one costing you interviews.

  • No obligation, either way

    You get the scorecard whether or not you ever engage us. Some people take it away and fix the document themselves, which is a perfectly good outcome.

  • Capped at fifteen a week

    So that every review gets a senior writer’s proper attention. If this week is full, your submission rolls into next week’s queue.

What a document that gets read looks like

Real examples from our work. Click any one to read it in full.

Medical sales executive resume sample
Luxury retail executive resume sample
General counsel resume sample

What this leads to

After forty applications with nothing back, this is what the other side of it looks like.


5 daysFirst draft, after your branding sessionDelivery
2 weeksFinalised, polished documents in your handsDelivery
6 weeksMost clients report being in a new role, from receiving their documentsClient reported
Under 3%Clients who have invoked the rework guarantee or asked for a refundFive years, measured

Clients self-report salary increases ranging from $12,000 to $160,000 a year. They also tell us interview invitations pick up noticeably — we have not measured that comprehensively, so we will not put a number on it. The guarantee figure covers five years of engagements and is counted directly; the rest is what clients report back to us.

If you already know it is the document

Skip the diagnosis and get the work done.


If there is a specific role with a closing date, our express service delivers a tailored application within forty-eight hours. If you are running a broader campaign, the executive packages cover the resume, cover letter and LinkedIn profile together.


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