Nobody Reads CVs Any More. Here’s How to Get Hired Anyway.

It has never been easier to apply for a job, and never been harder to get one. That paradox is the whole youth jobs market in one sentence, and understanding it is the difference between applying into a void and actually getting hired.

A graduate in the 1990s might have posted a dozen job applications in a summer. Today’s graduate can fire off a hundred in a weekend, each one polished by AI to a high shine. And because everyone can, everyone does. The average vacancy now drowns in applications, employers hide behind software to cope, and the software rejects most people before a human being has glanced at their name.

The result is a market that feels broken from both ends. Young people say they’re applying into a void. Employers say they can’t find anyone. Both are telling the truth. That’s the puzzle this post untangles: first the market as it actually is, then what it means for employers, and finally a practical, numbered list for the young people trying to get in.

The Market, in Plain English

If you’re finishing school or university in the UK right now, here’s the honest picture.

If You’re Leaving School

You can’t simply leave education. In England you must stay in some form of education or training until you’re 18, which in practice means staying at school or college, or finding an apprenticeship. Apprenticeships are the underrated route here: you’re paid, you’re learning, and you skip the graduate-scheme scrum entirely.

A story about how this actually works. My first office job started in 1998, and it was the first position I ever applied for: a “trainee” role, which is what we called an apprenticeship back then. I was interviewed by the managing director himself. It was terrifying. I’d barely set foot in an office before, and I was privately dreading the idea of spending five days a week in one. The interview started slowly. Then, ten minutes in, the MD found common ground: we both supported Ipswich Town. We spent the next forty minutes on that, including Ipswich’s recent 5-0 demolition of Norwich and the impending play-offs. Unbeknown to me, he was skilled enough to melt away the stress of a first-ever interview so he could see the real me. And that was enough to convince him to offer me the job. The rest is history.

I’ve hired many apprentices myself in the years since, and however radically the market has changed, one thing hasn’t. Your CV won’t be much help in securing that apprenticeship or first job, because there’s nothing on it. Every school leaver’s CV says roughly the same thing, and the employer knows it. What gets you hired is you: your attitude, your communication, your ability to convince an employer that you’re worth investing time, energy and resources to train and develop. That MD wasn’t really talking to me about football. He was checking whether I could hold a conversation with a stranger under pressure, which, it turns out, is most of office work.

So understand what the interview actually is. The employer isn’t trying to work out how good you are now. They’re trying to work out how good you could be in 12 to 18 months. That’s the game. Everything you show them (turning up early, having done your homework on the company, asking questions, admitting what you don’t know instead of bluffing) is evidence for the forecast. The candidates who get hired aren’t the ones pretending to be the finished article. They’re the ones who make the future version of themselves easy to believe in.

If You’re Leaving University

You’re entering the toughest graduate market in years. Youth unemployment is running well above the general rate, the number of young people not in education, employment or training has been climbing, and, crucially, employer confidence is low. When businesses feel uncertain, the first thing they stop doing is hiring people without experience. Entry-level roles are also the ones most exposed to AI: the routine research, admin and first-draft work that used to be a graduate’s first two years is increasingly done by software. The bottom rung of the ladder hasn’t been removed, but it has been sawn thinner.

None of this is your fault, and it’s worth saying so plainly. A rejection in this market is mostly information about the market, not about you. But markets like this reward people who understand how the game actually works, and the game has changed more than most careers advice has noticed.

A Word to Employers: Your Next Hire Isn’t Looking Where You’re Advertising

Here’s the bit most hiring teams haven’t caught up with. Young people don’t start their job search on your careers site, and increasingly they don’t start it on a job board either.

They ask. They ask TikTok what it’s like to work somewhere. They ask Reddit whether your graduate scheme is any good. And, more and more, they ask an AI assistant (“what are the best companies for a first marketing job near Manchester?”) and take the answer roughly as seriously as their parents took a newspaper. The mechanics of that shift, and why budget no longer buys your way into the answer, are covered in SEO versus GEO.

This should worry you more than it does. If the AI can’t see you, if your employer brand, your roles, your reviews and your story aren’t legible to the machines young people now consult, you were never even considered. Rejection at least means you were in the room.

And this is not a small-company problem. When we scored the UK’s ten biggest retail and consumer goods employers, household names every teenager could recognise, the median brand was named in a quarter of the prompts candidates actually use. Fame does not carry you into the answer.

The old rule was: fish where the fish are. The fish have moved, and they’ve brought translators. Your employer brand is now read by two audiences, nineteen-year-olds and algorithms, and neither of them will wade through a PDF on your careers page. It’s why we built SetpointHQ Pro to measure exactly this: how visible your employer brand actually is to the AI assistants and search tools candidates now use. If you’ve never checked, the free careers site audit is the quickest way to find out.

But this post is mostly for the people on the other side of the screen. So:

Top Tips for Young People: How to Actually Get Hired

A principle before the list. In a market where everyone has the same tools, the tools stop being an advantage. When every CV is AI-polished, a polished CV is just the entry fee. The way to win a game everyone is playing identically is to play it slightly differently. That’s the thread running through everything below.

1. Understand the robot before you try to beat it. Most medium and large employers run applications through screening software before a human sees them, and now, often, an AI that reads and ranks them. These systems are literal-minded. They match the words in your CV against the words in the job advert. So read the advert like an exam question: if it asks for “customer service experience” and your CV says “worked front of house”, change your CV to say both. Use their vocabulary, not yours. This isn’t gaming the system; it’s translation.
2. Keep the format boring so the content can be interesting. Screening software chokes on graphics, columns, text boxes and photos. Use a clean, single-column layout, standard headings (Experience, Education, Skills), and send it as a Word document or simple PDF as instructed. Save your creativity for what the CV says, not what it looks like. A beautiful CV that can’t be parsed is a love letter posted without an address.
3. Write the CV around evidence, not adjectives. “Hard-working team player” is a claim anyone can make, which is precisely why it’s worthless. “Ran the till on Saturdays for two years and trained three new starters” is evidence, and evidence is scarce. You have more of it than you think: part-time work, coursework, sport, volunteering, the family business, the club you helped run. Numbers beat abstractions every time. How many, how much, how often, how long.
4. Use AI to prepare, not to apply. Here’s the counterintuitive bit: the more applications AI writes for you, the more you sound like everyone else, because everyone else is using the same AI. Use it instead as the world’s most patient coach: to research the company, to generate likely interview questions, to critique your CV against the job spec. Then write the final words yourself. Recruiters can smell an unedited AI cover letter at forty paces, and what it smells of is indifference.
5. Apply like a sniper, not a shotgun. Fifty tailored applications beat five hundred identical ones, and not just because tailoring works: mass-applying trains you to be rejected. Pick the roles you actually want, spend an hour on each, and reference something specific about the company that proves a human was involved. Specificity is the cheapest way to be rare.
6. Do the things that don’t scale, because nobody else will. Everyone applies online, so the online channel is where all the competition is. Almost nobody phones to ask a sensible question before applying, turns up to an open day, emails the hiring manager directly with two good sentences, or sends a follow-up note after an interview. These things feel awkward, which is exactly why they work: effort is convincing precisely because it can’t be faked at scale. In a world of infinite identical applications, mild inconvenience is a signal of sincerity.
7. Build proof of work, not just a list of wants. If you want a job in marketing, market something (a club night, a charity bake sale, your own small project) and write about what happened. If you want to code, put something on GitHub. A visible, finished thing, however small, puts you ahead of the many applicants who merely want. Employers hire evidence of appetite, and appetite is easiest to prove by having already eaten.
8. Tidy up what the internet says about you, then make it say something useful. Assume every serious employer will look you up, and that the AI screener may get there first. Get a LinkedIn profile with a decent photo and a two-line summary of what you’re about; make anything you’d rather a grandparent didn’t see private. Then go one better: post occasionally about what you’re learning. It costs nothing and quietly answers the question every employer is really asking, which is whether you’re interested in the thing or just in a salary.
9. Treat apprenticeships and imperfect first jobs as routes, not consolation prizes. The perfect graduate role is heavily oversubscribed precisely because everyone agrees it’s perfect. The adjacent role (the smaller firm, the apprenticeship, the job one rung below your ambitions) is where the queue is short and the learning is fast. Careers are made by trajectories, not starting points, and it is far easier to move up from inside than to shout in from outside.
10. Persist on purpose. In this market, rejection is the default output of the machine, and it is not a verdict on you. The people who get hired are rarely the most talented; they’re the ones still applying, still improving, still following up in month four when the equally talented have given up. Build a routine, track your applications, ask for feedback even when you won’t get it, and treat the search itself as your current job. Stamina is the most underrated qualification in Britain.

The Short Version

The youth jobs market is genuinely hard right now, and pretending otherwise helps nobody. But hard markets are also unusually good at rewarding the small minority who do the unfashionable things: tailoring, phoning, finishing, following up. When everyone else is optimising to be identical, the biggest opportunity is simply to be memorable, both to a human and to the machines that now guard the door.

And if you’re an employer reading this, wondering why your entry-level roles attract a thousand applicants but none of the ones you wanted: the best young candidates are asking machines about you before they ever meet you. It might be time to find out what the machines are saying.