If you've sent thirty applications and heard back from three, you've probably wondered if your CV layout is the problem. It almost never is.
Hiring teams aren't reading carefully. The senior person screening your application has 80 to look at and an hour to do it. They're scanning for one thing: can I verify any of this without leaving this tab?
If the answer is no, you're rejected — not because your experience isn't real, but because they have no way to tell.
What gets through
The applications that survive that first scan have at least one of:
- An employer the screener has heard of, with a verifiable tenure.
- A linked GitHub or portfolio that loads, has recent activity, and shows work that matches what's being claimed.
- A reference name that's findable on LinkedIn at the same employer in an overlapping period.
- A specific outcome with a number attached — "shipped X to Y customers in Z months" — that could in principle be checked.
None of these prove you're the right hire. They make it cheap for someone to take you seriously enough to schedule a 25-minute call.
What gets dropped
The applications that get filtered usually have one of:
- A multi-year stretch at a company the screener can't find online.
- "Various technologies" lists with no project to attach them to.
- Generic outcome claims ("improved performance," "led the team") without specifics.
- No public profile, no portfolio, no contactable references.
The screener isn't dismissing your career. They're concluding that they cannot, in the time they have, distinguish your application from one that's been polished but isn't real.
How to fix this without lying or oversharing
You don't need to invent achievements. You need to make the real ones checkable.
- Pick three accomplishments and add specifics. Not "led the migration to AWS." Try "led a 7-person migration of our payments service from on-prem to AWS, completed in Q2 2024 with zero downtime."
- Link the work, not just the role. A repo. A blog post. A demo URL. Even a closed-source project with a paragraph describing what it did and what your contribution was.
- Name a real reference. Don't list "References on request." Pick someone who'll vouch in writing if asked, and signal that you've prepped them.
- If you have employment gaps, acknowledge them briefly. Burying them looks worse than naming them. "2023: contracting / sabbatical" is fine.
Where Dealt fits in
Verifying your own credentials before you apply is what we do. The verification report attached to your application gives screeners the thing they were looking for in those first 90 seconds, without you needing to write a perfect resume.
You still get to choose where you apply. We just give you a way to make sure that when you apply, the basic checks are already done.
— The Dealt team