You’re certified. You’re experienced. So why aren’t you landing interviews?
The cybersecurity job market may still be candidate-short, but that doesn’t mean employers are hiring blindly. In 2025, companies are being more selective than ever, especially when it comes to roles that influence risk posture and compliance outcomes.
If you’re struggling to get interviews, chances are your CV isn’t telling the right story. Here’s what hiring managers and recruiters are actually looking for, and what your CV might be missing.
Common CV mistakes that cost interviews
1. Too much jargon, not enough meaning
Listing every acronym in your toolbox won’t get you through the first layer of screening; recruiters aren’t impressed by alphabet soup – they want to understand your impact. A line like ‘Led SOAR implementation to streamline incident response’ tells a much better story than ‘Implemented SOAR, EDR, SIEM, IDS, IPS…’, but an even better line would be ‘Reduced incident response time by 45% through SOAR implementation across multi-cloud environments’.
2. No business outcomes
Saying you ‘managed SIEM’ doesn’t cut it anymore. What changed because of your work? Did the number of false positives drop? Did detection times improve? Aim for a descriptive line like ‘Optimised SIEM tuning to reduce alert fatigue, cutting false positives by 70% within three months’.
3. Unclear role or seniority
Too often, it’s unclear whether a candidate led a project, contributed to it or simply observed it happening. If your CV has ‘Participated in cloud migration’, a hiring manager won’t know if you managed the project or just attended meetings. Be as specific as possible, like ‘Led a six-person engineering team to securely migrate 250+ workloads to Azure, achieving ISO 27001 compliance on schedule.
Four things you should always do when applying for jobs
Quantify impact
Recruiters want to see measurable results. Think like a business partner, not just a technologist.
- Security uplift: ‘Achieved ML2 Essential Eight compliance across 42 school sites, 3 months ahead of audit.’
- Risk reduction: ‘Cut external vulnerability exposure by 63% through proactive patch management program.’
- Productivity: ‘Automated endpoint hardening tasks, reducing manual workload by 15 hours per week.’
Highlight tools and context
Don’t just list platforms – show why you used them and in what environment (enterprise, OT, cloud, hybrid, regulated). For example: ‘Deployed CrowdStrike across 1,200 endpoints in a PCI-DSS environment to improve ransomware defence posture.’
Make leadership visible
If you’ve coached junior analysts, managed vendors or run war rooms, say so. These are high-value capabilities, especially in lean teams. For example: ‘Mentored two graduate SOC analysts, both of whom secured senior roles within 12 months.’
Tailor, tailor, tailor
Every job ad is a clue; review it carefully and align your CV with the employer’s actual pain points. If the ad mentions ‘incident response in cloud-native environments’, don’t lead with firewall management from 2017.
Hiring managers don’t have time to decode your experience – you need to make relevance obvious. Focus on clarity, outcomes and alignment with the job you’re applying for. If your CV looks like a list of responsibilities, it will be skimmed. If it reads like a record of results, it will be remembered.
