Why you are not hearing back

A single posting can draw ~250 per postingsrc. Nobody reads that many documents. What happens instead is that the applications go into a database and a recruiter searches it, then reads the handful that come back.

That is worth sitting with, because it reframes what your resume is for. It is not an essay someone will study. It is a record that either turns up in a search or does not, and only after it turns up does anyone spend 7.4 secondssrc deciding whether to keep reading.

Being rejected and never being retrieved produce exactly the same experience: no email. The difference is that one of them is fixable this afternoon.

Open the PDF you have been sending. Try to select a line of text with your cursor, the way you would to copy it.

• Text highlights: your file has a real text layer. The mechanical failure is ruled out and you can stop worrying about this one.
• Nothing highlights, or the whole page highlights as one block: it is an image. A parser reads nothing from it, so every application you sent with it went in blank.
• Text highlights but comes out scrambled or interleaved when pasted: usually a two-column layout, which many parsers read straight across and turn into fragments of two different sentences.

This costs nothing and takes less time than reading this paragraph, and it is the single highest-value check available to you, because it is the only failure that is total. Everything else on your resume is a matter of degree. This one is on or off.

If the file is readable, the next question is whether it contains the words somebody would search for. Not keyword stuffing, which is a different and worse thing. Just the ordinary vocabulary of the job you are applying for.

• Contact details in the document header or footer. Many parsers skip those regions entirely, which does not weaken your resume, it removes your phone number and email from it.
• An abbreviation where the posting uses the full phrase. If they search "accounts payable" and you only wrote "AP", you are not in that result set. Writing "accounts payable (AP)" puts you in both.
• A job title nobody searches. Internal titles like "Growth Ninja" are invisible. Put the recognisable title on the resume and keep the internal one in the bullet.
• Skills inside a graphic, a rating bar or a five-star widget. There is no text there to find.
• Dates written inconsistently across roles, which parse into unreliable employment ranges.

Suppose you run the check and the file is clean. The text extracts perfectly, the titles are conventional, the vocabulary matches. You are still hearing nothing.

Then the mechanical explanation is gone and what is left is the harder one. With hundreds of applicants for a role, a strong candidate gets passed over routinely, and not because anything is wrong with them. Sometimes the job was filled internally before it was posted. Sometimes someone was simply a closer fit. Sometimes it is a genuine no.

We are not going to tell you that none of this is ever about the substance, because that is what people selling fear say, and it is not true. What we will say is that it is worth eliminating the cause you can control before you conclude anything about the ones you cannot.

Nobody outside a given company can tell you why they went quiet. Any tool that claims to know your odds against a named employer invented that number.

• Run the ten-second selection test on the exact file you have been sending. If it fails, re-export a real PDF from your editor and stop sending the old one immediately.
• Move your phone number and email out of the document header and into the body, under your name.
• Put the conventional job title on the resume, even if your employer called it something else.
• Pick one posting you actually want and check your resume against its vocabulary, adding only the terms that are genuinely true of you.
• Then stop optimising and go back to applying. Past this point the returns are small, and volume aimed at roles that fit you beats another afternoon of formatting.