You cannot proofread your own positioning

Six engineers sent me their profiles in one week. Senior people, an Apple featured developer, engineers at banks and IoT companies. Every profile was strong. Every one was underselling itself the same way: the best evidence buried where nobody reads, the generic material on top.

One had helped his startup get acquired as its only mobile engineer. That was one sentence, at the bottom of his second job entry, under a keyword list.

One had certified payment systems and embedded hardware experience before year four, presented as a plain chronology that reads junior.

One more, and this is the most common shape: an engineer with a genuinely rare specialisation, two hard domains in one career, presenting it as a list of employers in date order. Read as a chronology it says junior climbing. Read as evidence it says scarce. Same facts, and the profile chose the weaker reading.

That is the mechanism underneath all three. Your CV is organised the way your career happened, because that is the order you lived it. A stranger reads it looking for a claim and finds a timeline instead. The gap between those two readings is where interviews get lost, and you cannot see it from inside your own history.

None of them knew. And they could not know, because you cannot proofread your own positioning. You know your story too well to see what a stranger extracts from it in ten seconds. The committee never meets you. It meets your pack, and your pack was written by the one person alive who cannot read it cold.

This week's fix, 10 minutes. Hand your CV to someone who does not know your work history. Give them ten seconds with it, then ask one question: what am I good at? If their answer is not the thing you believe you are good at, you have found your gap, and it is almost always fixed by moving your strongest evidence to the top. Run it with two people and the pattern becomes unmissable.

Most engineers polish their materials for months and never test what those materials actually transmit. Ten seconds of a stranger's reading is worth more than another evening of tailoring.