How to Optimize Your CV and Get Hired Faster 🚀

Hey there.

I'm Mark Colgan, for those that don't know me.

I have built this tool to potentially help you find a job.

So I'm going to walk through the process that you should go through.

When you first sign in, you'll receive an email with your username, which will just be your email address and a password.

And, once you click login, there should be a small onboarding workflow.

So the first thing you need to do is log in and then once you're signed in, you should be prompted to go through an onboarding workflow.

It's not showing for me because I think it also knows that I'm an admin on this computer.

But the first thing that you need to do is paste in your cv.

Now the reason why we're pasting in the CV here is because the tool is going to look at everything that your CV says and then match it to the job descriptions that you're going to upload to the platform.

So I've created a cv, earlier.

I'm just going to paste it in here.

It doesn't matter if this looks messy at all.

The tool is going to extract the information from the CV and then populate the details here.

It takes a minute or so to add in.

Okay.

As you can see, the summary is pulled through from the cv.

It's pulled through the different career histories.

So it's got the job title, the company and the dates it's listed out technologies.

So for certain roles, technologies are more important than others.

It's also added in the LinkedIn profile.

This is just a made up profile.

and as you can see it repeats down here.

And then towards the end we've got key achievements.

It's always important to add as many key achievements as possible and then key strengths, recommendations or testimonials.

And then for those of you who might be applying for a copywriting role or graphic design role, what I'd recommend that you do is put your portfolio URL in the brands that you've worked with as well as portfolio highlights.

But that's optional.

Not every company, needs a portfolio or every role needs a portfolio.

So you can also go through and edit this so you can add in additional points if you want to.

And this will be important in a second.

So now that we've got our profile complete, that's all you need to do.

You can click down here analyze a role, or you can click here, which is let's get you hired.

And now what?

This is asking you to do is to paste in the job description as well as the company URL of the role that you want to apply for.

It's very hard to scrape data from LinkedIn, so we have to do this a little bit manually, but it shouldn't take too much time.

This is a job description that I want to apply for.

So first of all I'm going to take the title and put that here and then I'm going to go down to the actual about the job, the description and just paste all of it.

sometimes you can miss out the information where it talks about the benefits because that's not really too important for the purpose of this document.

And then the last thing you need to do is put the URL of the company that you're applying to here.

Now that might be tricky if you're applying for recruitment agencies.

one tip.

If you're applying for a recruitment agency and they don't say who the company is, usually when they describe the company, they will copy and paste it from the about page of that company.

So I tend to search that in Google and if I see that I get a match in terms of the way the company's being described, that usually gives me an indication that this company is the one that's hiring the role through the recruiter.

So now I'm going to click analyze role.

This takes around 60 to 90 seconds.

What's happening in the background is it's looking at the company website, it's looking at the job description.

So all of the responsibilities, everything that's listed here, it's looking at that and then it's cross referencing this against what you've got in your cv.

After it's finished the analysis, it will give you a score out of 100 of how well your CV matches the job description.

Now, there will be instances where you know that you can do this job, but potentially the CV that you put in doesn't have enough information or doesn't say exactly what they're looking for.

While this is loading, I definitely recommend that you take a look at the company's website.

This will help you when it comes to, putting together a cover letter and also updating your cv.

Okay, so this has given me a match score of 96%.

in the, in reality, your, your first time you do this, it may not give you high score.

it's also giving some tips of what you could do to improve that score even more.

And the reason it's scoring it like this is because I've tried to design this In a way that works with the application tracking systems that companies use.

Oftentimes they look for keywords and also a recruiter scans a cv.

So you need to make sure that your CV is created in the way that when a recruiter looks at it in just a few seconds they get a very clear understanding that you can do the role.

So as you can see here, it does give you top actions and then it goes through and gives a summary of the company as well as what they're looking for.

So it's just basically pulled that through from the job description.

Now as we scroll down we can see that we've got a, your fit.

So this really talks about how your CV matches the job description and this can be used for your interviews as well.

So it's always worth going back to this.

If you do land an interview with this company, it pulls through that you have in this example, enterprise sales leadership experience.

You sell to data engineering and infrastructure Personas deal site.

So it's matching what your CV says to what the job description says.

Then it also gives you potential gaps.

So in the job description it said that they wanted somebody who's scaled from 30 to 300 million.

However your experience is 18 to 27.

I appreciate these numbers are big numbers, but this is quite classic for a sales role.

now this is a great example that companies will say what they're looking for, but they'll never find 100% of a perfect match from what they're looking for to what the candidates have as well.

So this is something to be mindful of.

This is probably going to be a question that they'll ask you in the interview.

Then it gives you additional CV recommendations as well.

So things to emphasize such as your role, should lead strongly.

your elastic role deserves more prominence than it might typically receive because it's related you worked with a similar industry.

That's what it's saying there Also, gives you cover letter guidance.

And then this tool also will try and find a potential hiring manager or direct line manager for the role.

So in this case it's found, Mike and given the LinkedIn profile, it does try and find the email address.

But the tool that I've got in the backend doesn't always find everybody's email address.

So then what to do next if it didn't find the email?

You can use any one of these tools.

All of these have a free trial or once a month, every month you get 100 credits or something.

So they're Completely free to use, and then you use it to try and find that person's email address.

Then you need to pick your scenario.

So, do you want to reach out to the hiring manager?

This is the person who likely owns the role.

So if in this case it's the head of sales role and Mike is the chief revenue officer, that's typically who that person reports into.

So then this is what you should do.

You should, send an email to Mike to that person that you found when you just click on Easy Apply.

That's what everybody does.

So you need to do things that stand out a little bit differently.

And the what to do next steps help you with a few different angles here.

The, next angle is that you can't find the hiring manager, but there's another person in the same department.

So there might be another sales manager or sales leader in this case.

So try and find them via LinkedIn and then you can send them an email.

And again, I've included email frameworks here, not templates.

You do need to edit these yourself.

and then lastly, you want to make sure you follow up.

Always be following up.

I recommend that you keep a tracker that helps you stay on top of all of the roles that you've applied to and the different stages that they're at.

And if you check out the get hired course, it's just a completely free course for you to go through.

It takes just a, handful of minutes.

But there's information here about applying for roles as well.

I'm going to go and find a job that I am not qualified for, just to show you what it would look like.

Okay.

To get to another job that you want to analyze, you can click back to let's get you hired or click back here.

Sorry.

And then you have a new analysis.

So the CV is still the same.

Haven't made any changes there, but now you can see that there's your recent searches or your past searches and the score that you got.

And I'm going to put in a job which should hopefully not, be a good fit, just to show you what that looks like.

So I've got the company name there or domain there.

And then I'm going to, take the job title.

So again, it does take a little bit of copy and pasting, but yeah, you just need to put a little bit of effort in this bit and then I'm going to copy the description and the benefits you don't really need to add, but, you know, the more data, the better.

Click analyze Role.

And again, wait 60, 90 seconds for this to analyze.

Okay, now we can see it's come back with the results and it says that there's a low match.

Now again, this is not something you should take personally.

It's just telling you that what your CV is saying, there is a low match between what your CV says and what the job description is asking for.

So it gives you an idea again of what hard skills, your experiences, achievements, keywords and industry you need to add to your cv.

Now I'm not saying or suggesting that you lie and add things that aren't true, but this, this, these are the things that the matching tool is looking for.

So it gives you some actions here.

So rewrite the the CV summary to position James as a sales leader with deep hands on experience in revenue operations.

So this gives you a bit of a justification as to why this role might be a stretch.

And I know what it feels like when you're looking for roles.

You might even feel a bit desperate.

You'll take anything at the moment, but the reality is that a recruiter is looking to match up your CV to the job requirements as much as possible.

They really aim for around 70% matching.

So it is disheartening not hearing back.

But by applying for roles that you're not a fit for, you're just going to increase the number of roles that you don't hear back from, which just doesn't feel good.

However, the tool I've built does allow you to improve your match.

So if you click on this button here, improve the match, it gives you recommendations of where you should update your CV or your profile so that it pulls through information from the job description.

So for example, consider creating a dedicated revenue operations contributions sections.

So it's telling you that the job description requires one to five years in Revenue Operations, Sales Operations or CRM.

James has 15 years at VP Direct level in this case.

If it was, if I was James and I was using the tool, I wouldn't apply for this role.

It's not a fit for me.

Even though I need the job, even though I've got bills to pay, I would focus on finding roles which I was a better fit for.

However, what you can do is you can then start to edit your CV here and then you can rescore the role.

Now I'm going to make some changes and try and increase my score from 28%.

Okay.

For the purpose of this demo, I have added in the skills and strengths here.

I've also added in detailed information about the rev ops, stuff that James has done, which was is, is ideally to match with the job description and then also added worked with rev ops here.

So again, I'm not encouraging you to lie.

if the, if the match is that low and you don't have the experience, then I strongly recommend that you try to apply for a different role.

But I'm just going to click the rescore here now that I've made those changes and we will see that it was 28% before it, it should increase more.

However, it's not going to be a perfect match because the CV is overqualified for this particular role.

But let's just pause and see what the rescore comes back as.

So you can see that the score has increased just by 6% but it's still saying that it's not a fit.

I just wanted to show you how that rescoring would work.

And then when you go back to your profile, you'll be able to see that the updated information that you put in here has updated your profile, which will help you for future roles.

You can also copy all of this text here and then create a different version of your CV which is specific for the role that you're hiring.

if you read the get hired course, you'll see that I mentioned that you need to create a different CV for every role that you apply to, but you essentially use your original CV as the boilerplate, create a copy and then just edit the roles and responsibilities, your key achievements, your skills to match each of the jobs that you apply to.

I know that looking for a job is tough.

I really hope this tool helps you there, by helping you match more of your CV to the job description and then giving you a few techniques to follow up with the hiring managers, people in the team and maybe even HR as well.

If you get stuck or run into any issues, just email me on the email that I sent you, your login with And yeah, good luck.