I Thought He Had Followed My Guide. Then I Saw His CV.

A few days ago, someone contacted me after reading my German Application Guide.

He didn’t just read it. He took the time to write several pages of detailed feedback. I really appreciated that because honest feedback helps me improve my work.

He also told me that he had rewritten his CV based on my guide.

Naturally, I was curious.

I asked him if he would send me his CV so I could see the result.

He did.

To be honest, I didn’t even read it.

I simply looked at the design.

My first thought was:

This doesn’t look like a German CV at all.

It looked as if it had been created with AI. The overall design reminded me much more of a Dutch or international CV than of the traditional German tabular CV that recruiters are used to seeing.

So I told him exactly that.

I wrote that it looked like it had been created with Copilot and that it had very little in common with the typical German CV format.

He replied that he had never even heard of Copilot.

Of course, I cannot know which tool he used. That wasn’t the important part.

The important part was that the result looked like an AI generated international template instead of a CV designed for the German job market.

I explained the visual differences between the two styles.

Another thing immediately caught my attention.

His CV was already three pages long.

At that point I hadn’t even looked at his positioning, his experience or his achievements because the design itself already told me that the CV was not built for German recruiter expectations.

Now imagine I had never seen his CV.

Imagine he had simply continued sending applications with that document.

Then he would probably have wondered why nobody was inviting him to interviews.

This is exactly what I see every day.

Many international IT professionals send 100, 200 or even 300 applications without understanding why they receive no response.

The reason is often much simpler than they think.

Recruiters don’t spend ten minutes analysing every CV.

They spend only a few seconds deciding whether they want to continue reading.

If the CV already looks unfamiliar or doesn’t match what they expect, it can be rejected before anyone even looks at the content.

In my next article, I’ll show you the visual differences between an international CV and a traditional German tabular CV.

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