YOUR CV ISN'T BEING REJECTED. IT'S BEING SCREENED OUT BEFORE ANYONE READS IT.
If you're targeting C-suite or director-level roles and getting silence, the problem isn't your experience. It's how the first 7 seconds of your document read to someone who has already decided to say no. A headhunter with 30 years on the hiring side of the table will show you exactly where the decision is breaking down — and rebuild the page that matters.
Secure Your Audit — £245 Pre-paid. No discovery call. Immediate diary access after checkout.THE 7.4-SECOND PROBLEM
Forget the "75% ATS rejection" statistic that circulates on LinkedIn. At senior level, the screening is overwhelmingly manual. A hiring partner or internal recruiter picks up your document, scans page one, and makes a binary decision in under eight seconds. They are not reading for keywords. They are reading for risk.
Three questions determine whether you progress or get filed:
If your page one doesn't resolve all three inside that window, you receive an avoidable "no" — regardless of whether you were the strongest candidate in the process.
A CV WRITER OPTIMISES PRESENTATION. A HEADHUNTER OPTIMISES THE DECISION.
Most executive CV services are run by writers. Good ones, sometimes. But writers who have never sat in a shortlisting meeting, never briefed a remuneration committee, and never had to defend a candidate recommendation to a sceptical chair.
That gap matters. It's the difference between a document that looks professional and one that removes the reasons a buyer says no.
I've spent 30 years on the hiring side — leading executive searches, sitting in the rooms where placement decisions are made, working across sectors and geographies where the stakes run into the millions. That isn't a credential line. It's the reason I can look at your CV and tell you, in specific terms, where the decision is failing. And it's almost never where you think.
WHAT YOU LEAVE WITH
Not feedback. Tangible, defensible assets you can deploy immediately.
A buyer-side assessment across the five areas that determine whether your document progresses: positioning clarity, scope and scale, proof density, credibility and defensibility, signal-to-noise ratio. Each scored. Each with a specific correction.
We rebuild the top third of page one during the session — the section that determines whether the remaining pages get read at all. Your level and value land inside the screening window.
You receive the exact framework used in the audit to convert responsibilities into commercial outcomes. You'll produce 4–6 bullets that read as credible and defensible under interview interrogation — not inflated, not vague.
A clean structural pass to ensure your document reads fast and behaves reliably across common screening workflows. No gimmicks. No two-column formatting that breaks when parsed. Predictable, professional, scannable.
THE DIFFERENCE IN PRACTICE
"Led transformation programme across finance and operations."
"Led a finance and operations transformation across 6 countries and 14 sites (£240m cost base; £8.5m programme budget), redesigning order-to-cash and procure-to-pay workflows, tightening controls and installing a new operating cadence through standardisation and governance. Result: £12.4m run-rate benefit, 19-day cash conversion cycle improvement within 12 months."
You are not inventing metrics. You're selecting evidence that already exists in your career — and writing it so the reader's decision becomes simple.
HOW THE AUDIT WORKS
I audit your CV and target role before we speak. The session starts with diagnosis already complete — no warm-up, no intake questions.
Zoom. Screen-shared. Live edits to page one, hard decisions on what stays and what goes, narrative reconstruction in real time.
Within one business day, you receive your scored Fix Map with prioritised corrections and the evidence formula — everything you need to complete the rebuild.
We do not invent metrics. We do not inflate titles. Every claim must be defensible under five minutes of interview interrogation. Where evidence is missing, we mark it and I tell you exactly what data you need to gather.
ABOUT MARK ROSS ROBERTS
30 years in international executive search and advisory work. 30,000 logged hours of board-level negotiations. 10,000 documented coaching hours. Four published books. That's the short version.
The longer version is this: I've spent my career on the side of the table that decides who gets hired and who doesn't. My background in M&A advisory — the kind that requires access to boardrooms, not job boards — built a network across sectors and geographies that most recruiters never reach. I work directly with every client. No delegation. No junior associates reviewing your document.
You're not buying outsourced CV writing. You're buying the judgement of someone whose job, for three decades, has been to evaluate exactly the kind of document you're about to send.
EVERY WEEK OF SILENCE IS A WEEK OF LOST LEVERAGE
The market doesn't wait. Roles fill. Shortlists close. The longer your document underperforms, the more ground you concede to candidates who may be less qualified but better positioned.
£245Single session. Pre-paid. Immediate diary access after checkout.
Secure Your Audit Slot — £245 8 Strategic Audits Per Month — Limited Availability100% confidential. Secured by Stripe. Redirected to private Calendly immediately after payment.
A 2024 LinkedIn Talent Solutions report found that 76% of hiring managers make shortlisting decisions within the first 10 seconds of reviewing a candidate profile. Separately, research published in the Harvard Business Review identified that structured, evidence-based career narratives increase interview conversion rates by up to 40% compared to competency-list formats. The gap between qualified and selected is, overwhelmingly, a communication problem — not a capability one.
