You spent three evenings on your CV. The recruiter who opens it spends about 7.4 seconds on the first pass. That number — from eye-tracking research that watched where recruiters actually look — is the most honest fact in the whole job-search industry, and the one almost nobody designs for.

Seven seconds is not reading. It is triage. The recruiter's eyes jump between a handful of anchors — job titles, employers, dates, the top quarter of the page — and the decision is made before your carefully worded third paragraph is ever reached. The CV is not competing to be persuasive. It is competing to be findable.

The Scan Has a Shape

Because scanning follows a pattern, it can be designed for. Recruiters look for structure first — clear headings, dates in a predictable place, job titles they can parse at a glance. A CV that fights the scanner's eye loses before its content is read. A CV that respects the pattern gets the content read.

This is why the honest advice is unglamorous: recent and relevant first, job titles that match the market's vocabulary, achievements with numbers over duties with adjectives, and white space the eye can rest on. None of that is trickery. It is layout as literacy.

The Myth Worth Unlearning

You have probably heard that 75 per cent of CVs are auto-rejected by robots before a human ever looks. It is everywhere — and it is not what the evidence says. The verifiable figure is almost the opposite: research on ATS adoption finds roughly 97 per cent of large employers run one, but the mainstream systems are filing cabinets, not judges. They store, sort and search. The person who rejects your CV is overwhelmingly still a person — on a seven-second clock.

That matters because the fix is different. You do not need to trick software; you need to survive a tired human's first glance. Keywords still matter — but as retrieval terms for the search a recruiter runs, not as incantations for a gatekeeping robot.

Build One Section at a Time

The practical route is boring and effective: build the CV one section a day. Nail the structure that survives the scan, write a profile that frames you, convert duties into achievements, tailor for keywords, handle gaps and job-hopping with an honest line, then run a final audit on the whole document. Seven days, one finished CV.

That is exactly the course our new CV Writing Essentials walks you through — one lesson a day by email, templates included, finishing with a CV built for the way recruiters actually read. If the 7.4-second verdict worried you, this is the week that fixes it.

The verdict is passed in seconds, so the document has to be built for seconds — CV Writing Essentials — and for what comes after the shortlist, Interview Skills That Work.

And if the verdict becomes a search, Jobsearch Strategies for the Digital Age maps the rest of the funnel.