Why Generic CVs Fail in Tech Hiring (And What to Do Instead)

Your CV looks fine. It lists your roles, your stack, your years of experience. You’ve tweaked the formatting. You’ve added the right keywords. And yet the silence after each application stretches on.

The problem isn’t your CV. It’s that you’re sending the same one to twenty different jobs.

Why generic applications don’t work

Tech hiring teams read dozens of applications for every senior role. The first filter isn’t a human — it’s an ATS scanning for exact-match keywords, or a recruiter who spends eight seconds per CV before deciding whether to move forward.

A generic CV optimised for “software engineer” is optimised for nothing in particular. It doesn’t speak to the specific team’s challenges, the stack they’re actually using, or the type of ownership they expect. It reads like a menu, not a pitch.

What targeted looks like

A targeted application answers three questions before the hiring manager has to ask:

1. Do you understand what we actually build? A sentence or two that shows you’ve read the job description, their engineering blog, or their product — and that you get what makes this role different from a generic backend position.

2. Have you done the relevant work? Not “5 years of Python” — but the specific kind of Python work this team needs: distributed systems, API design, ML pipelines. Reorder your bullets so the most relevant project is first.

3. Can you articulate your impact? “Led migration” is forgettable. “Reduced p99 latency from 800ms to 120ms by migrating to async workers, cutting infrastructure cost by 30%” is not.

The honest trade-off

Targeted applications take longer per application. The answer isn’t to send fewer applications — it’s to send fewer generic ones and spend that saved time researching the ones you care about.

That’s what Kataru is built to help with: keeping your career narrative rich and structured, so that tailoring each application doesn’t mean starting from scratch every time.

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