Your CV was never going to tell your story
Picture the person reading your CV. Not you reading it, them. By the time they get to yours, they’ve read a hundred others that day, maybe two hundred. “Strategic leader with a track record of driving growth” has gone past their eyes more times than they could count, and it stopped registering somewhere around CV number eleven.
That’s not because your story isn’t distinctive. It almost certainly is. It’s because we’ve all become so used to dressing our experience up in the same handful of acceptable phrases that everyone’s story starts to sound identical on the page, even though the actual stories underneath are nothing alike. You’re not competing with people who’ve had less interesting careers than you. You’re competing with people who’ve described very different careers using exactly the same six words you did.
AI has sped this up, certainly. But the underlying habit predates it by decades. We were taught a CV is supposed to sound a certain way, and so that’s what we produce, regardless of how different the actual underlying story is.
The chronological CV still has a job to do
This isn’t an argument against the traditional CV. It still serves a real purpose: it tells someone, quickly, what you’ve done, where, and for how long. Recruiters and hiring systems need that, and skimming two hundred CVs a day is only possible because the format is predictable. There’s no getting around it, and no point pretending otherwise.
The problem isn’t the format. It’s where people put all their energy. Most of the time spent on a CV goes into perfecting that chronological structure: better verbs, tighter bullet points, a cleaner layout. All useful. None of it touches the actual question, which is what’s distinctive about the particular sequence of things you’ve done, the thing that would actually make CV number eleven stop and read properly rather than skim past.
I worked with a client whose CV was, structurally, excellent. Clean, well-organised, properly formatted. It also described her as “a strategic leader with a track record of driving growth,” which told me nothing I couldn’t have guessed. When we actually talked, it turned out she’d rebuilt a team from two people to twenty after the previous leader left it in genuine disarray, and she’d done it by deliberately hiring people who didn’t look like the obvious choice. That’s not a line that belongs neatly on the chronological CV. But it’s the thing worth knowing about her, and it had never made it anywhere: not the CV, not her LinkedIn, not how she talked about herself in interviews.
The CV was never going to be where this lives
The mistake isn’t using a chronological CV. The mistake is treating it as the whole job, and then wondering why nothing distinctive about you ever surfaces anywhere else either. The real texture, the actual reasoning behind your choices, the thing that’s genuinely particular to your path, was never going to fit into bullet points under a job title. It needs somewhere else to live: a LinkedIn post, a cover letter, the way you answer a specific interview question, a conversation with someone who could put your name forward.
That requires actually knowing your own story well enough to tell it precisely, rather than reaching for the version that sounds acceptable. It’s different work to perfecting a CV layout, and most people never get round to it, because the CV felt like the task, and once that was polished, the job felt done.
A question to sit with
Think about the person who’ll read your CV today, not as a document, but as someone several hundred CVs into their week. The CV will do its job: dates, titles, structure. It was never going to do the other job.
Is there a specific decision, constraint, or piece of reasoning behind your career that’s genuinely yours, that nobody would find on your CV however well you wrote it?
Where could that actually live instead, the cover letter, the LinkedIn post, the answer to a particular interview question, and when did you last put it there properly?
