What does a CV actually tell you about someone? Job titles, dates, a page of bullet points written to sound as impressive as two sides of paper will allow. It’s not nothing. It’s part of the story. But treat it as the whole story, and you’ll miss almost everything that actually matters.
I know that because my own CV barely scratches the surface of how I actually got here. My first job was at McDonald’s, thirteen years old, six months on the till and the fryer. Four years in retail at Target after that, then eight years at JB Hi-Fi, starting as a counter manager before moving into administration. Then a long run through hospitality management, including years with Grill’d opening brand new restaurants across Victoria, New South Wales and the ACT: full set-ups, hiring and training a team that had never worked together before, running the actual opening when everything that can go wrong usually does. When a store wasn’t performing, I’d be sent the other way, to find out what was actually broken and turn it around. My CV has a brief outline of some of my achievements, but without a conversation it could easily be misunderstood or skimmed across.
From there into disability employment services, then years in national government health recruitment at Serco, with more travel again for conferences, expos, site visits and stakeholder meetings that took me through Cairns, Townsville and Brisbane, and now Centr. Talent Co. Read a list like that uncharitably and it looks like someone who couldn’t settle. Read it properly, and it’s someone who’s had to learn how genuinely different industries think, more times than most people do across a whole career.
Here’s what a document like that can’t hold. It can’t show you how someone actually behaves when a restaurant’s short-staffed on a Saturday night, or when a client’s upset and needs someone calm on the other end of the phone. A CV records what someone did. It doesn’t record how they did it, who they became doing it, or what they’d bring to a completely different room next.
The numbers tell a similar story. SEEK’s most recent analysis of Australian job ads, covering the twelve months to August 2025, found customer service was the single most in-demand skill employers listed, not a qualification, a program, or a specific industry background. Relationship management and team leadership weren’t far behind. As SEEK’s Kylie Pascoe put it, businesses are looking for people who can communicate effectively, build strong relationships, and lead teams with empathy and clarity.
I see a version of this play out constantly in the medical and allied health recruitment I do now. Many healthcare professionals and specialists don’t lean heavily on their CV to demonstrate their ability, so what shows up in the application is often quite simple: qualifications, roles, dates. The clearer picture comes through conversation and clinical context, not formatting. That matters even more once you look at what’s actually short. Jobs and Skills Australia’s most recent Occupation Shortage List, released October 2025, found close to two in five professional occupations nationally are still in shortage, health among the hardest hit, driven largely by too few qualified applicants rather than too few jobs. Screening out a genuinely capable person before anyone’s spoken to them costs more in a market like that, not less.
Which is why I do sometimes wonder how much weight we’re putting on systems, including AI screening tools, right at the top of that process. They’re useful for efficiency. But there’s a real risk that strong candidates are filtered out before anyone’s actually spoken to them, on the strength of formatting a genuinely capable person just isn’t focused on getting right.
That’s also why I don’t treat a career break, or a run of shorter roles, as a red flag on its own. In one of my own recruitment roles, at Serco, compliance meant even a gap of a month or two had to be explained and recorded, and the most common reason, by a distance, was maternity leave. A completely normal part of a working life, reduced to a line that had to be accounted for. It’s stuck with me. Most gaps and shorter stints have a reasonable explanation sitting right behind them: a redundancy, a contract that ended, a parent who needed care, a year that was simply hard. The candidates who are upfront with me about it are, almost without exception, the ones I’d put in front of a client without a second thought.
The data backs up how ordinary this actually is. The Australian Bureau of Statistics’ most recent job mobility figures, for the year to February 2025, show 57 percent of Australia’s 14.3 million employed people had been in their current role for less than five years, and 40 percent had been there somewhere between one and four years. A couple of years in a role isn’t the exception. Statistically, it’s close to the norm.
If you’re a business owner or hiring manager, ask yourself what you’re actually screening for. Ruling someone out because their CV shows a few shorter stints, or a gap you haven’t asked about yet, might feel like filtering out risk. More often, you’re filtering out the exact person who’s adaptable enough to actually be useful to you. The best hiring decisions I’ve been part of have come from a conversation, not from what a document was formatted to say.
Centr. Talent Co is built on the values Cass and I actually operate by, not just believe in. We ask the questions. We seek clarity instead of assuming it. We present a person in their entirety, not just whatever fits neatly into a template, and we advise, consult and assist rather than just forwardinga CV and hoping it lands. I’ve personally sat down and rewritten CVs for health professionals who didn’t have the time to do it themselves, adding the context and criteria a role actually needed that simply wasn’t there before. Without that hour or two out of my day, some of those people wouldn’t have made it through the process, not because they weren’t capable, but because the page hadn’t said so yet. The CV is part of the story. The rest is always worth asking about.
One last thing, for the candidates and job seekers reading this rather than the business owners. Have a proper look at what’s actually in your CV. Is there enough context on it, or are you assuming someone will already understand what a role involved? Should it change for every application? Potentially, yes, at least the framing of it. Highlight the experience and knowledge that’s actually relevant to the specific role, wherever and whenever you can. Your CV is one part of that. So is your cover letter. So is a short, personalised email, or a message to the hiring manager or recruiter on LinkedIn, when you can find them. None of those replace each other. Together, they’re what actually gets you read properly.
Sources: Australian Bureau of Statistics, Job Mobility, February 2025. SEEK job ad analysis via SBS News, 17 November 2025. Jobs and Skills Australia, 2025 Occupation Shortage List, October 2025.
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