I place the world’s top software engineers and interviewed over 10,000 job seekers. The difference on paper and in person is wider than ever

Paddy Lambros is founder and CEO of AI recruiter Dex.

Go to LinkedIn on any given day and you can read horror stories of hiring managers receiving thousands of AI-generated CVs, or applicants applying unsuccessfully for thousands of roles. 

But while hiring is an undoubtedly dysfunctional process (one we are trying to fix, by the way) the main reasons that people don’t get hired existed long before AI. 

Before I built an AI recruitment startup for software engineers, I worked in actual recruitment, finding the best tech talent for companies like Microsoft, Accenture, Deloitte. 

I’ve interviewed thousands of applicants, and it is fair to say I’ve seen a few interview train-wrecks. But my main takeaway is that the reasons people don’t get hired are relatively simple – and avoidable – and that, as an applicant, you really have to do very little to stand out. 

You can’t win on the strength of your CV, but you can lose.  

If you send out a document that looks terrible, is full of spelling mistakes or doesn’t make sense, then you are sending a pretty negative signal of what you think good work looks like. 

The main reason CVs fail is because they talk guff: “I conceptualised the Q3 planning process” or some such nonsense. 

You need to be concrete: ‘I helped build X. I helped the company sell........

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