Should I get someone to review my CV?

"Someone" is four different readers

Someone is not one role but four, and each can answer a different question. Separating them in advance is what turns contradictory feedback into usable feedback.

The close reader — partner, brother, neighbour — knows nothing about your trade, and that is exactly why they are valuable. They measure legibility: whether the document makes clear what you do, where you do it and what came of it most recently. No expertise required; expertise would in fact spoil the measurement.

The reader from your field knows the work and can tell whether your description is plausible: whether the team size fits the role, whether the task list sounds like the level you claim, whether a tool is missing that everyone in that job uses daily. They are the only one of the four who notices both overstatement and understatement.

The reader who hires knows one procedure — their own. They can tell you the order in which they read and what makes them set a file aside. That is valuable and bounded at the same time, because it describes a single screening desk.

The automated check measures only what is measurable without context: structure, whether the file can be read, completeness — and, if you supply an advert, the conditions stated in that advert. It is the only one of the four available at four in the morning, and the only one with no incentive to be polite.

What an outside eye finds reliably

There is a class of fault you cannot see in your own document, because you know what it is supposed to mean. Internal role names that meant something only inside your last company belong to it, as do house abbreviations, unexplained project names, and site names that only make sense to someone who knows the company's structure.

Then there is everything technical about the file itself. The filename as it appears on a stranger's screen. Fonts that get substituted on another device and shift the line breaks. A second page consisting of three orphan lines. A photo that turns soft once exported to PDF. None of this shows up on the machine where the document was written.

And finally the order of attention. Whatever your reader mentions first after reading is the actual ranking of your page, whatever ranking you intended. If the hobbies come up first, the top half is too weak — that is a finding about layout, not about hobbies.

Why wording advice is mostly dialect

The most common feedback on a CV is about words: that role is called something else, that term is dated, nobody writes it that way any more. The advice is nearly always sincere, and nearly always local.

In the ongoing analysis of open vacancies, 73.4 per cent carry a job title that occurs exactly once in the whole market. Only 9.0 per cent of vacancies share their exact title with a vacancy from a different employer, and there are eighty-two distinct titles for every hundred vacancies. There is, in other words, no shared vocabulary in this market against which your wording could be corrected.

The spread is not the same everywhere. Project management runs at ninety-two distinct titles per hundred vacancies, nursing at eighty-eight, office roles at eighty-seven, construction at eighty-four, IT and hospitality at seventy-eight each. Retail is the counter-example at thirty-seven: a handful of large chains advertise many branches in identical words. Only in a field like that does a customary title really exist.

In practice: take your reader's suggestion as an additional option, not as a correction. The title in your CV describes what you did; what one particular employer calls the same work is written in their advert and nowhere else. The one place where wording can genuinely be decided is therefore the vacancy you are applying to.

The reader who hires has seen one employer

"Show it to someone who hires" sounds like the strongest advice available, and in one respect it is: that person really has screened applications and really has set files aside. What they describe, though, is one screening desk.

Among employers currently advertising in the index, 45.1 per cent have exactly one vacancy open and 30.4 per cent have between two and four. Only 4.4 per cent are running twenty-five or more at the same time. Most employers hire rarely — so a friend who screens at such an employer has seen few applications, and holds very precise views about those few.

The conclusion is not to discount them but to ask a better question. Instead of "how does my CV come across?", try: how many applications did you look at last time? What made you set one aside? Which two facts did you look for first? Those answers are checkable and transferable; a general verdict on your CV is neither.

The same applies to recruitment professionals. Their feedback is fast and practised, but it comes from a mandate: they read your file against the roles they are currently filling. That is an excellent test — for those roles.

What no reviewer can check for you

The conditions that decide an application are not in your CV. They are in the advert, and they are usually stated there in plain words.

72.7 per cent of open vacancies state a language requirement explicitly. The cross-tabulation is the more interesting number: 28.6 per cent require at least one language other than the language the advert is written in, and 17.7 per cent require that other language at professional or native level. A German-language advert demanding professional French is ordinary in this market — and a reviewer who reads only German will not see that condition anywhere in the text.

Location, workload, start date, qualification and permit work the same way. None of them is a question of phrasing. They are either met or not met, and checking them takes minutes if the advert is lying next to the CV — and is impossible if it is not.

That is why one small change to your brief does so much work. Instead of "have a look at this", say: here is the advert, here is my CV, which three conditions from the advert can you find again in the CV? Same person, same half hour, an entirely different result.

The brief: five closed questions instead of one open one

A good brief is short, closed, and answerable by someone with no knowledge of your trade. Five questions are enough and take a quarter of an hour between them.

One, the retelling: read for sixty seconds, put it down, say what I do for a living. Two: which city or region am I working in at the moment? Three: which two results stuck with you? Four: at which line did you stumble or have to jump back? Five: which abbreviation or job title did you not understand?

Add a sixth if you like, though it only works with an advert attached: which requirement from this advert can you not find again in my CV? That question is the only one in the set that says anything about fit.

Two things do not belong in a brief. A request for an overall verdict, which produces politeness. And a request to "correct everything", which produces rewriting in the corrector's dialect and costs you more time than it returns.

What waiting costs

A round of feedback has a price in days, and it is almost never counted. Of the vacancies open today, 4.8 per cent are at most three days old, 11.8 per cent at most five days and 36.4 per cent at most a fortnight; the median open vacancy has been advertised for twenty days.

So waiting five days for a reply while sending nothing does not cost you "a few days". It costs you the freshest slice of the market — precisely the slice where the shortlist is not yet drawn.

The fix is dull and rarely applied: keep applying during the round. The CV you have today is good enough for the vacancies open today; the improved version starts with the next application. Put a deadline on the round as well — Sunday, or it goes without you — otherwise it quietly extends by weeks.

And do not send twenty pages. One CV, one specific vacancy, five questions: that comes back. A full application dossier with a request for honest feedback usually does not come back at all.

Who does this officially in Switzerland

The question is old enough that the public careers service answers it. berufsberatung.ch, the joint portal of the cantonal careers, study and vocational guidance offices, writes on its job-search page: "Falls Sie Mühe haben, gute Briefe zu schreiben, lassen Sie Ihre Bewerbungsunterlagen von jemandem in Ihrem Umfeld beurteilen. Sie können auch professionelle Hilfe in Anspruch nehmen, indem Sie sich an ein Textbüro wenden oder einen Bewerbungskurs besuchen." In English: if you find it hard to write good letters, have your application documents assessed by someone around you, or take professional help from a writing bureau or an application course. The French edition of the same page puts it as "demandez à faire relire vos documents de candidature par une personne de votre entourage".

If you are registered with the RAV, you already have that second reader. arbeit.swiss describes the counselling like this: "You will work together to draw up a professional situation analysis as a basis for all further steps", and the existing search strategy "can be jointly reviewed and adapted if necessary. It may also need to be critically assessed." That critical element is exactly what friendly proofreading in your own circle lacks.

Courses on application technique run through the labour market measures. arbeit.swiss states that the RAV usually decides whether a measure is "appropriate and sensible", that jobseekers may apply "of their own accord and at any time", and that for courses the application must reach the RAV "at least 10 days before the start of the measure". That deadline is the reason a course cannot be arranged in the week you happen to need it.

Which leaves the fourth reader, the automated check. It replaces none of the three human ones, but it answers the single question none of them can answer reliably: which conditions from one specific vacancy, open today, can actually be found again in your CV.