One thing that got somebody hired.

The thirty-second scan, and what survives it

Michael sent ninety-one applications in fourteen months and got four interviews. He assumed the problem was his age. It was the seventh bullet of his second role.

Buried down there, past the rotas and the health-and-safety compliance, was this: he had redesigned a stock process and cut write-off by thirty-one percent — ninety-six thousand pounds in a year. The advert he kept applying for asked for continuous improvement experience twice, once in the essential list.

He had it. He had evidenced it. He had put it in position eleven.

Here is what nobody tells you about the first pass. Whoever opens your application is not reading it. They are checking, in about thirty seconds, whether it is worth reading — and they are checking against a list they have in front of them. Anything below the fold is not being weighed and found wanting. It is not being seen.

So the question is not "is my best material in here". It is "is my best material in the first fifteen lines, in the words they used".

Michael moved one sentence. Stock redesign, thirty-one percent, ninety-six thousand pounds — into the opening paragraph, using the phrase "continuous improvement" because that was the phrase in the advert. He changed nothing else. He got three interviews from the next eleven applications.

The uncomfortable part is that this is not a story about writing better. It is a story about a man who already had the thing, and lost fourteen months to where he had put it. That is the most common failure I see, by a distance, and it is completely free to fix.