There is a statistic that has been frightening candidates for years. 75% of CVs, it says, are rejected by software before a human ever sees them. Career coaches repeat it. LinkedIn posts cite it. Entire industries have been built around helping people "beat the ATS."
The statistic is fiction. It traces back to a company that went out of business over a decade ago. A 2025 study of recruiters found that only 8% of employers use systems that auto-reject candidates. The rest use the software to sort, rank, and pass applications to a human reviewer.
Which means the industry built around defeating an algorithm is mostly solving the wrong problem.
The filter that actually kills strong candidates is the one that runs after the software. A person. A pile. Six to eight seconds.
The algorithm is a gate, not a judge
Applicant Tracking Systems matter, and getting them wrong has consequences. They match your CV against the job description language. Poor formatting confuses the parser. Mismatched terminology drops your ranking before anyone reads a word.
So fix that first. Use the exact language of the job description. Not a paraphrase of it. If the role says 510(k), your CV says 510(k). Standard section headings. No tables, no graphics, nothing buried in headers or footers. A Word document over a PDF if the instructions don't specify.
This takes twenty minutes. It isn't the hard part.
The hard part is the pile
A recruiter on the other side of a competitive search picks up your CV and spends six to eight seconds deciding whether to keep reading. They're not analysing it. They're scanning for a signal. Most CVs don't send one.
A professional summary at the top, two or three lines that answer the job description before the reader has to look for it, is the signal. If the role needs five years of orthopaedic sales experience and you have eight, that's the first sentence. Not a modest paragraph buried in a job from four years ago. The top line.
For sales professionals: products sold, customer type, performance. Three things. All visible in under 20 seconds.
For regulatory professionals: 510(k), PMA, De Novo, 21 CFR references, MDR 2017/745. These are the terms recruiters search for on LinkedIn. If they're not on your CV, you may not exist in those searches at all.
For senior leaders: the business you walked into, the business you left behind, what changed in between. Numbers if you have them.
The person reading your CV isn't looking for reasons to call you. They're looking for reasons not to discard you. Make the reasons to discard you as few as possible.
77% of CVs are rejected for something fixable in an afternoon
Not experience gaps. Not a mismatch with the role. Typos and grammar errors: 77% of hiring managers say they'd reject a CV on this basis. An unprofessional email address catches a further 35%.
Neither of these is a reflection of your ability to do the job. They're a reflection of whether you checked. Use Grammarly's free version. Ask someone else to read it. Send it from a professional email address.
These aren't tips. They're the price of admission.
The move that turns you from an entry into a person
Seven hundred people once applied for a role I was managing. One sent a follow-up email the same day. Short. Confirmed they'd applied. Said in two sentences why they actually wanted this particular position.
I called them first.
Not because the email was exceptional. Because it was the only one. Because following up is so rare that when someone does it, they immediately become a person with genuine interest in a specific job, rather than a number in a system applying to everything that matches a keyword.
Apply. Send the email. Make the call. In that order.
The algorithm is a myth inflated into a monster. The real question is simpler: when a person picks up your CV for eight seconds, what do they see?