Why your CV is not getting a call

Silence has a few ordinary causes

No reply is not a verdict on your career. The pile can be large. The role can close. The file can be a picture. Or the text can parse cleanly and never use the words the recruiter searched. Those are different problems, and only some of them are yours to fix this week.

Start with the file, because it is the one you can see today. Upload the PDF you sent to the free Resume Score. If Parse Rate is low, the silence might be mechanical: the experience never became searchable text. Rebuild in one column and send the new file next time. If Parse Rate is high, open the exact ad and look for nouns that are absent from your bullets. That absence is a Job Match Score question, not a self-worth question. Paste the ad only if you are willing to edit toward words that are already true.

Some silence you cannot score away. A posting that asked for a license, a city, or a language you do not have will stay quiet, and it should. Do not buy a rewrite that hides the gap. Do not send twenty more copies of the same broken PDF while you wait. One repaired file, aimed at one honest ad, tells you more than another week of refreshing the inbox.

Make the text selectable

Put your name in the body of the document, not only in a colored header. Use one column. Headings a person would say out loud are enough: Experience, Education, Skills. Each role is a block with the employer, the title, and dates as text, then bullets. Do not build the layout from tables, text boxes, or a row of software logos. Word can do this. A poster app usually cannot.

Export a PDF and try to drag across one bullet. If the highlight skips, the words are still a picture. Upload that PDF to the free check at `/resume-score/`. Parse Rate is the share that came out as clean text. It is a JobHoot heuristic, not a reading from any employer's ATS. Resume Score on the same page is about the document, with no account and no job ad. If Parse Rate is low, fix the file and upload again before you think about keywords.

Then match one posting, if you have one

Job Match Score needs a sign-in and one vacancy. It lives at `/ats-checker/`, which is not in the sitemap. It asks whether this file uses that ad's words next to work you did. It does not average itself with Resume Score into a single ATS score. The marketing line can still say ATS score, because that is the search. The result page should not.

A token costs Rp 250 when an AI write succeeds. A new account gets 50 tokens once. The guest score does not spend them. The smallest purchase later is 100 tokens, Rp 25.000. Do not spend one to invent an employer, a degree, or a date. If the ad wants a license you do not hold, leave the gap.

What to send

Send the PDF whose text you could copy. Keep the designed poster for a human who asked for a visual, and even then keep a text version. Switching templates inside JobHoot does not delete the lines you typed, and the export stays text. A PNG downloaded from a gallery is not a template you can be searched through.

A week of evidence, not a week of refreshing

Send the repaired PDF to one role you still want. Write down the date. Do not also send the old poster "just in case." Two files teach you nothing. If a portal only allows one upload, the text version is the one. Give it several business days. Silence after a readable, relevant file is information about the pile or the role, and the next useful move is a different ad, not a twelfth synonym for the same bullet.

If you are sending into a form that pastes your PDF into fields and shows you the fields, read what landed. Empty experience fields mean the extract failed, which you would also have seen as a low Parse Rate. Full fields with the wrong words mean the writing, which is the Job Match Score problem. Those two screens are the whole diagnosis. The rest is waiting, and waiting is not a technique.

One repaired PDF, one ad, one date written down. That is the whole experiment. A twelfth synonym is not a second experiment.

Write the date you sent the repaired PDF. Wait several business days. Then change the ad, not the synonym. Empty portal fields mean the extract failed. Full fields with the wrong words mean the writing.

Then stop refreshing.