The CV that was too polite to get her the job — and how to fix yours

I want to tell you about a woman I'll call Sarah.

Sarah had fifteen years of experience in operations management. She'd restructured a department of forty people, delivered a cost saving programme that kept her company afloat during a particularly brutal trading period, and quietly built a team culture that people genuinely didn't want to leave. Her manager relied on her completely. Her colleagues respected her. She was, by every measure that actually matters, exceptional at her job.

Her CV said she had "supported the delivery of operational improvements" and "assisted the leadership team in implementing strategic change."

I nearly missed her entirely.

That's the thing nobody tells you about CVs. The person reading yours isn't reading it the way you wrote it — slowly, carefully, with full context. They're scanning. Pattern matching. Making a decision in seconds about whether this person sounds like someone things happen to, or someone who makes things happen. And when the language is passive, when the verbs are soft, when every achievement has been quietly hedged and credited outward — that decision gets made fast, and it rarely goes the right way.

Sarah got through, eventually. But it took longer than it should have. And she nearly didn't apply at all, because she'd looked at the job description and talked herself out of it twice before a colleague pushed her to send the application.

I've thought about Sarah a lot over the years. Because she isn't unusual. She is, in my experience, the rule rather than the exception.

The language women use on their CVs — and where it comes from

Spend twenty years in recruitment and you start to notice patterns that nobody really talks about in polite company.

One of the clearest ones is this: mid career women, on the whole, write CVs that are far too modest for the careers they've actually had.

Not because they lack experience. Not because they haven't done extraordinary things. But because at some point — in a performance review, a meeting, a corridor conversation with a manager, or simply through years of absorbing what was and wasn't rewarded around them — they learned that owning their contribution too directly wasn't a great look.

So they soften it.

Supported instead of led. Assisted instead of drove. Contributed to instead of delivered. Helped facilitate instead of built from scratch.

The language shrinks, and with it, so does the impression of the person on the page.

What's insidious about this is that it doesn't feel like shrinking when you're doing it. It feels like accuracy. It feels like not overclaiming. It feels, often, like the professionally appropriate thing to do — because ambiguity about whose credit it really was, or who else was involved, or whether "led" is slightly too strong a word for what technically happened — that ambiguity has been used against women often enough that they learn to pre-empt it.

The result is a CV that is scrupulously, painfully fair — and professionally devastating.

The same pattern shows up in promotion conversations too. The post on "why the same pattern shows up in promotion conversations too" explores the structural side of why women shrink their contribution in exactly the contexts where it matters most.

What the CV sitting next to yours actually looks like

Here is an uncomfortable truth from inside the hiring process.

The CV sitting next to yours — from someone with less experience, fewer years, perhaps a fraction of the track record you've quietly accumulated — is almost certainly written like a declaration. Bold verbs. Owned outcomes. No apology for taking up space on the page.

And I already know which one most hiring managers will read differently.

This is not about arrogance. The bolder CV is not necessarily more accurate. It is not written by someone who genuinely did more or deserves more. It is written by someone who has not yet been taught to doubt whether their contribution was really theirs to claim.

That's the gap. Not experience. Not capability. Not even confidence in the room — that can come later. It's the quiet, learned belief that making yourself too visible on paper is somehow unprofessional. That good work should speak for itself. That the right people will see it.

They won't. Not if you've buried it in passive language and collective pronouns.

The post on "what hiring managers are actually looking for when they read your CV" covers exactly what goes through a hiring manager's mind in those first fifteen seconds — and it's worth reading alongside this one.

Why this isn't a CV problem — it's something deeper

I want to be careful here, because this is the part that matters most.

The way a woman writes her CV is not a personal failing. It is not laziness, or lack of ambition, or poor self awareness. It is the entirely predictable result of what happens when you spend years in environments that reward women for being collaborative, humble, and focused on the team — and then, the moment you need to advocate for yourself on paper, you discover that the same instincts that made you excellent at your job are now working against you.

It is a confidence problem that has learned to disguise itself as professionalism.

And the reason it's so hard to catch is that it feels right. It feels like you're being accurate. It feels like the version of you that doesn't overclaim and doesn't show off and doesn't make colleagues feel like you're grabbing credit that belongs to the group.

But here's what I need you to hear: there is no version of your career that gets better by continuing to make yourself smaller on the page.

You cannot shrink your way to the next level.

The quick audit that identifies where your CV is working against you

Open your CV and find every instance of the following words: supported, assisted, contributed to, helped, facilitated, involved in, worked with, participated in.

Every single one of those is a candidate for replacement.

For each one, ask yourself: what did I actually do? Not what the team did. Not what the project achieved. What was your specific role, your specific action, your specific impact?

Then write that. In the first person. With an active verb. Without the hedge.

Not "supported the delivery of a new client onboarding process" — but "redesigned the client onboarding process, reducing time to first contact by three weeks."

Not "contributed to the team's revenue growth" — but "developed the client retention strategy that contributed to a 23% increase in repeat business."

Specific. Active. Owned.

The discomfort you feel doing this is worth examining. It's not arrogance. It's just honesty — and you are allowed to be honest about what you've built.

If this is where you're making a career change rather than just moving within the same field, the rewriting work is slightly different — you're not just making existing descriptions stronger, you're translating them into language a new field recognises. The post on "how to translate what you've done into language the new field recognises" covers exactly that.

If you want the full framework for positioning your existing experience as the foundation of a new direction rather than a liability, How to Change Careers Without Starting Over walks you through it. Download it free at bloominity.co.uk.

Where to start today

You don't need to rewrite everything at once. Start with the audit above. Find the soft words. Ask what you actually did. Write that.

Then read the revised version back to yourself. Notice whether it feels uncomfortably direct. If it does — that's usually a sign it's accurate. The version that feels like you're overclaiming is almost always closer to the truth than the version that felt professionally safe.

One strong CV, written in the language of what you actually built, will do more for your next move than a year of networking events and a LinkedIn profile that says "I'm open to opportunities."

You've done the work. It's time your CV said so.

If you want to keep reading about the hidden dynamics that shape careers — the unspoken rules, the patterns nobody names out loud, and the practical things that actually make a difference — The Bloom is my weekly newsletter. It goes out every Thursday at 7:30am and it's where I write the things that don't fit neatly into a blog post. You can sign up below.

Frequently asked questions about CV writing for career change

Q: Why do women undersell themselves on their CVs?

A: Because the language women use on their CVs is the entirely predictable result of spending years in environments that reward collaboration and humility — and then discovering that those same instincts work against you the moment you need to advocate for yourself on paper. Soft verbs, collective pronouns, passive constructions — they feel like accuracy, like not overclaiming. But to the person scanning your CV in fifteen seconds, they read as someone things happen to rather than someone who makes things happen.

Q: What CV language should I avoid when applying for jobs?

A: Watch for words like supported, assisted, contributed to, helped, facilitated, involved in, worked with, and participated in. Every one of these is a candidate for replacement. Ask yourself what you actually did — not what the team achieved, but your specific role, your specific action, your specific impact — and write that in the first person with an active verb. "Supported the delivery of a new process" becomes "redesigned the process, reducing time to first contact by three weeks."

Q: How do I write a CV that gets noticed for a career change?

A: Lead with outcomes, not tasks. Be specific about your contribution rather than collective achievement. Use active verbs — led, built, delivered, redesigned, drove, created — rather than passive ones. And remove the hedges: "worked with the team to" and "helped facilitate" are phrases that credit the work outward before the reader has even had a chance to assess your contribution. Your CV is not a modesty exercise. It's the one opportunity to make the case for yourself before anyone has met you.

Q: What is the difference between an active CV and a passive CV?

A: An active CV opens every achievement with what you did — "Led a restructure of forty staff." A passive CV buries the same achievement under soft language — "Supported the delivery of departmental restructuring." The experience is identical. The impression it creates is completely different. One reads as someone who owns their contribution. The other reads as someone who was present when something happened. Hiring managers are pattern matching quickly — active language is what registers as credible seniority.

Q: How do I know if my CV is too modest?

A: Read through it and count every instance of supported, assisted, contributed, helped, facilitated, involved in, worked with, and participated in. If you find more than three, your CV is almost certainly underselling you. Then read each achievement and ask: does this describe what I did, or what the project achieved? If the answer is the latter, rewrite it to lead with your specific action. The discomfort of doing this is worth noticing — it usually signals exactly where the underselling is deepest.