The software behind every online application doesn't judge careers. It extracts text — and it does that badly. Tables vanish. Dates garble. Twenty-six years can read as seven. We show you exactly what the machine sees, then fix the CV the recruiter never got to read. Without inventing a word.
No signup. No card. If your CV is fine, we say so.RICHARD MORTIMER Group Chief Operating Officer 2019–2025 · Helix Logistics Group £38m EBITDA improvement over 3 years — 11 skills inside a table: not read — — board & NED roles in a text box: not read — MBA, Warwick Business School
Most CV tools sell you a robot villain. We were on the other side of the desk for twelve years, so we'll tell you how it really works.
The figure traces to a 2012 software sales pitch. No methodology was ever published, and the company behind it folded a year later. An applicant tracking system is a searchable database — most reject no one automatically.
Parsers mangle tables, columns and text boxes, so your strongest material never makes it into the database. Then a recruiter searches by keyword, and skims whatever surfaces for about seven seconds. Silence isn't a verdict. It's a filing error.
Long careers, multiple roles at one company, board seats, portfolio work — the exact things a 26-year CV contains are the things parsing handles worst and a seven-second skim buries. Generic CV advice was never written for this.
The full explanation, written for humans:
"I watched strong operators lose interviews to table layouts and buried keywords. Not to better candidates — to formatting. That's a fixable problem, so I built the fix."
Hilton Ralph spent twelve years in specialist recruitment across the GCC, the UK and Southern Africa, personally reviewing more than ten thousand CVs and placing candidates from graduate to board level.
This platform encodes what that experience actually teaches: what a parser drops, what a recruiter skims for, and what a search consultant checks before a shortlist. No template gallery. No invented achievements. The same standards he'd apply sitting across the desk from you.
Most CV software is built for a first job. This is built for a twenty-year record that has to survive both the parser and the person.
Board and committee roles, NED positions, P&L scope, exits and transformations — the CV structure senior recruiters expect, with your early career compressed to a clean single line per role. 1998 doesn't need bullet points.
Paste a job description before you apply. You get an honest fit score with the gaps named — sector, scope, regulatory exposure — and no invented experience to paper over them. Apply with intention, not volume.
Headhunters cross-check. A title that differs between your CV and your profile, or dates that don't line up, quietly costs credibility at exactly the moment it matters. We catch every mismatch before they do.
Every line in an optimised CV traces to something you actually did. No fabricated percentages, no borrowed achievements, no filler bullets. You can defend every word in an interview — because every word was already yours.
An honest comparison, because you'd check anyway.
| Option | Cost | What you get | The catch |
|---|---|---|---|
| Executive CV writer | £400–£1,500 | A human professional rewrites your CV once. | One document, one version. Next role, next fee — and quality varies wildly. |
| CV Optimisation | $49–$89, once | Recruiter-grade diagnosis, an executive-structured master CV, honest fit checks and tailored versions per role. Yours for the access period, no subscription. | You do the thinking. We won't invent achievements to save you the effort. |
| Subscription CV builders | £15–£40 /month | Templates and keyword scores aimed at high-volume applying. | Built for early careers. Cancellation traps are the category's best-documented feature. |
| ChatGPT on your own | £0 | A capable generalist rewrite, if you prompt it well. | It cheerfully invents metrics, and it has never sat in a shortlist meeting. |
Upload your CV and see exactly what the parsing software extracts — what survived, what vanished, and the one change worth making first.