Your CV Isn't Being Rejected. It's Being Screened Out.
Senior roles don't go to the most qualified candidate. They go to the candidate whose documentation removes risk fastest. A forensic 45-minute audit from an international headhunter with 30 years of board-level placement experience — and 30,000 logged hours of negotiation on the hiring side.
Secure Your Audit — £245The Real Reason for Search Silence
The industry tells you it's an ATS problem — keywords, formatting, parsing failures. That's a convenient story for CV writers who sell templates.
The reality at director level and above is different. The overwhelming majority of senior rejections are manual decisions, made by a human being who spent fewer than eight seconds on your document. They're not scanning for keywords. They're scanning for risk.
Three questions, answered or not answered, in that first glance. Does this person actually operate at the level we need? Where is the evidence of commercial impact? Would appointing them be defensible to the rest of the board?
If your first page doesn't resolve those questions — and candidly, most don't — you receive a polite decline that has nothing to do with your capability. That's the information asymmetry at work. It is fixable.
A CV Writer Optimises Layout. A Headhunter Optimises the Decision.
Most CV services are run by copywriters, not practitioners. They'll improve your formatting, tighten your language, maybe add a "personal brand statement." Useful enough work. But it misses the point entirely.
I've spent 30 years on the hiring side of the table — leading executive searches, sitting in shortlisting meetings, advising on C-suite appointments across multiple geographies. That isn't a line on a website. It's the reason I can tell you, in specific terms, why a particular document isn't progressing. And what the hiring side actually needs to see before they'll move you forward.
This audit doesn't make your CV "nicer." It restructures the entire document around the decision the reader is trying to make. There's a meaningful difference between those two things.
What You Leave With
This is not a feedback session. It's a working audit. You leave with tangible, defensible assets you can deploy immediately.
Five-Point Risk Score
A forensic assessment against the five criteria the hiring side actually evaluates: positioning clarity, scope and scale, proof density, credibility under interrogation, and signal-to-noise ratio. Scored. Annotated. Actionable.
Page-One Reconstruction
We rebuild the top half of page one during the session. Your level, your commercial weight, and your value proposition — visible in the first scan. Live. Not templated.
Evidence Bullet Formula
The exact framework used in executive search documentation. You'll build 4–6 quantified achievement statements that are defensible under interview pressure. No invented metrics. No inflated language.
Screening Hygiene Check
A clean structure that reads fast and behaves reliably across screening workflows — human and automated. No gimmicks, no design risk, no formatting that breaks in transit.
How the Audit Works
Pre-Session Audit — 30 Minutes
I review your CV and target role before we speak. Not a skim — a structured assessment against the five-point risk framework. We start the session with a diagnosis, not a discovery.
Live Working Session — 45 Minutes
Zoom. Screen-shared. Live edits, hard decisions, and narrative reconstruction. We rebuild page one and produce your evidence bullet formula in real time.
Fix Map Debrief — Within 1 Business Day
Your annotated risk score and Fix Map, delivered as a working document. Every recommendation is specific, prioritised, and executable without further assistance.
We don't invent metrics. Everything in your document must survive five minutes of interrogation in a live interview. Where evidence is missing, we mark it — and I tell you exactly what data points you need to gather before your next application.
The Difference, in Practice
A real example of what changes when you move from role-description to decision-ready evidence.
“Led transformation programme across finance and operations.”
“Led finance and operations transformation across 6 countries, 14 sites (£240m cost base; £8.5m programme budget), redesigning order-to-cash and procure-to-pay workflows. Quantified result: £12.4m run-rate benefit, 19-day cash conversion cycle improvement within 12 months.”
You're not adding metrics. You're selecting evidence that already exists in your career — and structuring it so the reader's decision becomes obvious.
Who Conducts Your Audit
Mark Ross Roberts FMVA, CBCA has spent three decades in international executive search and advisory. Not writing CVs — making hiring decisions. 30,000 logged hours of board-level negotiations. 10,000 logged coaching hours. Four published books on executive positioning and career strategy.
His background in M&A advisory is what opens doors other headhunters can't reach: direct access to the unadvertised executive market through relationships built across decades of cross-border work. Currently completing the Wharton Executive Presence & Influence programme.
The principal-led model means Mark works with you directly. No delegation. No junior associates. No outsourced delivery.
Your Next Mandate Is 45 Minutes Away
Every week of search silence is a week of lost leverage. The gap between your capability and your market visibility is a solvable problem. It takes 45 minutes and costs less than a single morning of lost billing.
Secure Your Audit — £245 8 strategic audits opened per month100% Confidential. Secured by Stripe. Immediate diary access after checkout.
Research published by Harvard Medical School found that structured coaching interventions produce measurable, sustained improvements in executive performance outcomes. Separately, LinkedIn Talent Solutions data indicates that profiles presenting clearly quantified achievements receive significantly more recruiter engagement than narrative-only equivalents. The gap between capability and market visibility is well-documented — and it remains, for most senior professionals, entirely within their control to close.
