Why your CV isn't getting a response

Most senior professionals assume the market is the problem when applications go quiet. Sometimes it is. But more often, the issue is closer to home - and it's fixable.

I review thousands of CVs a year across legal and compliance roles in the Middle East. The same mistakes come up time and again, and they are costing good candidates opportunities they should be getting. Here is what is actually killing applications before anyone reads them properly.

You're writing tasks, not outcomes

This is the most common and most damaging mistake. "Responsible for drafting and negotiating commercial contracts" tells a hiring manager nothing. It describes a function, not a contribution.

Think of it like football. If a player's CV said "responsible for passing the ball" - you'd learn nothing. What you want to know is that they were the main playmaker, that crossing was their specialist skill, and that they got the most assists from crossing in the league last season. That tells you exactly what they bring, how good they are at it, and why you should sign them.

Your CV needs to do the same thing. Not what you were responsible for - what you were best at, and what you can prove.

"Responsible for drafting and negotiating commercial contracts" becomes: "Built the commercial contracts framework from scratch across three markets, reducing the average deal cycle by three weeks and removing the need for external counsel on routine matters." One is a job description. The other is a reason to pick up the phone.

Go through every bullet point and ask yourself: does this show what I delivered, or just what I was responsible for? If you can swap your sentence for someone else's without losing accuracy, it needs rewriting.

Your CV is too long

Senior candidates often make the mistake of thinking more detail signals more experience. It doesn't. It signals an inability to edit - and that is not a quality you want a hiring manager associating with you before they have even met you.

The best CVs at senior level are two to three pages, tight, and easy to scan in under a minute. Because that is roughly how long they get on a first pass. If the most important things aren't visible quickly, they won't be found. Paragraphs of dense text, a full page of responsibilities for a role from 2011, or five lines describing your education - none of it is helping you. Cut it.

You haven't tailored it

A CV sent to 40 employers that hasn't been adjusted once is visible immediately to anyone who reads enough of them. Hiring managers and recruiters are not comparing your CV against an abstract standard - they are asking whether you look right for this specific role, at this specific business, right now.

One practical way to do this: copy the job description, paste it alongside your CV, and run it through an AI tool like Claude or ChatGPT. Ask it to highlight gaps, suggest where your

experience is undersold, or flag language that doesn't match what the employer is looking for. It takes ten minutes and it is genuinely useful.

That said - don't let it rewrite your CV for you. An AI-polished application is almost as obvious as an untailored one, and it rarely sounds like a real person. Use it to sharpen what you've already written, not to replace your own voice.

Your opening summary is doing nothing

"A highly motivated legal professional with extensive experience across multiple jurisdictions seeking a new opportunity to add value..." Stop. Every senior candidate applying for the same role has a version of that line. It says nothing that distinguishes you, and it wastes the most valuable real estate on the page.

Your opening two to three lines need to be punchy - but they should also do something the rest of your CV can't: explain context that doesn't fit neatly into a career history.

If you are relocating to the UAE because your partner has just accepted a role here, say that. If you have built three legal functions from the ground up and are specifically looking for another business where you can do the same, lead with it. If you are moving from private practice to in-house, explain the why. These are the things that make a hiring manager pause and think "this makes sense" rather than "why are they applying for this?"

Be specific. Be direct. Say something only you could say.

You're not thinking about who is reading it

Here is something many senior legal and compliance professionals forget: the first person to open your CV is often not a lawyer. It might be an HR manager, a business partner, a recruiter with a generalist background, or an EA screening on behalf of a busy executive.

That means jargon-heavy language, unexplained acronyms, and assumed knowledge can quietly sink an application before it ever reaches someone who would actually appreciate the depth of your experience. You do not need to dumb anything down - but you do need to hold the reader's hand a little. Write as if the person reading it is intelligent but not a specialist. Because often, they aren't.

The uncomfortable truth

The market in the Middle East is competitive right now - there is no point pretending otherwise. But people are still getting hired. Senior roles are still being filled. The candidates getting responses are not necessarily more qualified than those who aren't. In many cases, they just have a CV that is working for them rather than against them.

If you haven't had a serious look at yours in the last six months, it is probably worth doing before you assume the phone just isn't ringing.