Why am I applying for jobs but not getting interviews?

Silence is the least informative thing that can happen to an application. It reads identically whether your attachment would not open, whether the post was filled internally before it was advertised, or whether your CV never answered the advert at all. One outcome, several causes, and no way to tell them apart from the outside.

So the work is elimination, and the order matters. Most people jump straight to the last item on the list, spend a weekend rewriting the CV, and leave everything above it untouched. This page runs the causes in the order that costs least to check, starting with the ones that take five minutes and are slightly embarrassing to find. None of it is a formula. It is a way of working out which of several ordinary problems you actually have.

The application never properly arrived. A CV attached in a format the recipient cannot open, a typo in your own email address, an online form saved but never submitted, a mandatory supporting statement given two lines. It sounds too trivial to be the answer. It is the answer often enough to check first.

The vacancy was not open in the way it looked. Roles get advertised with an internal candidate already lined up. Agencies advertise to build a pool. Old adverts get reposted without the original being taken down. None of that is about you, and none of it is visible from outside.

A hard requirement is missing. Right to work, a licence, a registration, a named qualification, a location, a shift pattern. These are pass or fail, and no amount of rewriting moves them.

You are shortlistable and the CV does not show it. The evidence exists, but it is on page two, or written as duties, or phrased in the vocabulary of a different industry.

The search is too broad. Applications spread across nine unrelated job families are nine job searches, each of them done badly.

Software plays a part in this, and a small one. Parsing failures are real, so a plainly formatted CV is worth building once. But there is no score to chase, and treating the software as the whole explanation is comfortable precisely because it puts the cause outside the document, where nothing is asked of you.

"I have sent 40 applications, had two rejections, and heard nothing at all about the rest." "I get interviews when somebody refers me, and never when I apply cold." Those are the readers this is written for.

It covers pre-interview silence only. If you are reaching interview and not converting, that is a different problem with different causes, and nothing on this page will find it.

It is also worth waiting before you diagnose anything. A fortnight of applications is not a pattern. Plenty of employers work to a closing date and then a shortlisting meeting, so an application sent last Thursday has not been rejected. Give it a few weeks, and enough applications to see a shape, before you draw a conclusion.

1. Check the plumbing. Email your own application to yourself and open it on a phone. Does the file open? Is the filename something you would want a stranger to read? Is the phone number right? Is the email address one you actually check, spam folder included?
2. List the last ten roles you applied for by job title. If you count more than three job families, stop here. That is your finding, and no CV edit fixes it.
3. Take the last three adverts and write out their essential criteria in the advert's own words. Beside each one, write the line from your CV that a stranger would point at as the answer. Where you cannot point at a line, that criterion is not evidenced, whatever you happen to know about yourself.
4. Check the hard filters separately. Right to work, licence, registration, named qualification, location, hours. These are pass or fail. If you are failing one, the answer is the qualification or a different target, not a better CV.
5. Read the top third of your CV out loud and stop after 20 seconds. What you got through is roughly what a first pass sees. If your best evidence was not in it, the CV is ordered wrongly rather than written badly.
6. Count claims against evidence in that top third. Strong communicator is a claim. Handled escalated complaints to a written outcome inside five days is evidence. If the claims outnumber the evidence, you have found your rewrite.
7. Look at the whole application, not just the CV. Was there a supporting statement box you gave two lines to? A question you skipped? Did you apply in the first few days, or on the closing date?
8. Only now rewrite, and rewrite one CV against one advert rather than trying to make the general version better.

Do not start with the rewrite. It is the most expensive step on the list and the one almost everybody does first.

Do not settle on the software as your explanation. Make the CV plainly formatted once: real headings, no text trapped inside images, nothing important buried in a header or a table. Then stop, because there is no number to optimise against.

Do not paste the advert's phrases into a skills list. A reader checks whether the word is attached to something you did. A row of unattached nouns answers nothing, and it is visible as an attempt.

Do not read silence as a verdict on you. Some part of it belongs to the role rather than to your application.

Do not scale up. Sending the same CV to twice as many employers produces twice as much of the same silence.

Do not wait on feedback. It is rarely offered before interview, and a week spent waiting for it is a week not spent on the next three applications.

The hard part of this diagnostic is the third step, because you cannot unknow your own history. Career Auntie's CV review reads your CV against one specific advert and returns between five and fifteen findings, each anchored to the exact line that prompted it, with a severity and a category. The category is the diagnosis: missing-keyword means a criterion is uncovered, weak-achievement means the evidence reads as a duty, formatting means the structure is in the way. There is no score and no percentage match, because no honest number could be calculated. The cheapest version of this whole page is running one CV against two different adverts and reading the difference.