You've submitted dozens of applications. Maybe hundreds.
You've read all the advice online. You've tweaked your CV. You've tried different strategies.
And still? Nothing.
No callbacks.
No interviews.
Just silence.
If that sounds familiar, you're not alone.
The problem probably isn't your experience. It's that you're wasting time on things that don't actually work.
Prefer to watch instead of read? This week's newsletter is also available on my YouTube channel.
Let's break down the four things that are killing your applications — and why you should stop doing them today.
1. Cover letters and portfolios
I ran a poll on LinkedIn and got responses from over a hundred hiring managers and recruiters for PM roles.
78% said they only look at cover letters for 0-2% of applications.
Over half of them never read them at all.
So if you're spending hours writing personalised cover letters for every job? Stop. It's not moving the needle.
One of my clients built his own custom GPT to generate cover letters. He thought he'd cracked the code.
Turns out, it made zero difference. He ran an experiment and found no meaningful change to his conversion rate.
Same goes for website portfolios and slide decks.
Another client was creating beautifully designed slide decks for every application. Hours of work. And after months, his application conversion rate was still under 1%.
It's not that his portfolio was bad. It's that hiring managers and recruiters just weren't looking at them.
Portfolios are great for Designers. Githubs are great for Engineers.
But you're a Product Manager—not a Designer, and not an Engineer.
Unless the job description explicitly asks for those artefacts, don't waste your time on them.
2. Long CVs
I've seen 15-page CVs. I've seen 5-page CVs.
They don't work.
A client came to me with a 5-page CV. He had years of experience across product and leadership roles, and wanted to show all of it.
The problem? Recruiters weren't getting to the good stuff.
Page 1 had a 3-paragraph narrative, a key skills section, and his educational background. Nothing about where he'd worked or what jobs he'd held.
His customers were overwhelmed with detail before they could see his impact.
We reworked his CV together. Cut it down. Led with outcomes. Made it scannable.
And he started getting interviews for the leadership positions he was actually targeting.
If your CV is more than two pages, you're sending the wrong signal.
Recruiters and hiring managers don't have time to read it all.
Keep it to one to two pages max. If you've been working for 10+ years, two pages is fine.
Anything beyond that, and you're only showing you don't know how to be concise—which is critical for a PM to do.
3. AI matching scores
There are loads of tools out there that promise to optimise your CV for ATS systems by giving you a "match score."
Here's the problem: They're doing keyword matching to a job listing, but that's not how recruiters and hiring managers read CVs.
I worked with a client who was getting a 90% match score and still had 50 applications with zero interviews.
Why?
Because he was optimising for the wrong thing.
When a job description talks about wanting someone who is a "dynamic product manager" or "team player"—and you turn around and use those words to describe yourself—it gives a great match score.
But a recruiter reads that non-differentiating fluff and doesn’t find what really matters: the impact you've made as a PM.
If you're going to do any kind of matching, make sure your impact bullets connect to the type of outcomes the job description mentions.
If they're talking about running experiments, make sure you talk about when you did that.
If they're talking about product vision, make sure you talk about when you developed one and got buy-in from the executive team.
4. Skills sections
You know that table of keywords at the bottom of your CV?
The one that just lists things like "Roadmapping, Jira, SQL, A/B Testing" that people online keep telling you to do as some 'hack' to 'beat the ATS'?
Get rid of it. It's not adding value.
I've seen dozens of top-performing CVs that convert at 10%, 20%, even 30%—and none of them have these skills sections.
This isn't the internet of 2001 where you can game an algorithm by keyword stuffing.
This is probably the biggest piece of misinformation I come across with nearly everyone I talk to.
Here's what works instead: Take those keywords and weave them into your impact bullets.
Don't just say "A/B testing" in a table.
Say: "Increased conversion by 18% in 6 months by running 12 A/B experiments."
What works
Once you've stopped wasting time on these four things, you'll want to know what does work.
Focus on:
- A scannable, outcome-led CV (1-2 pages max)
- Tailoring your impact bullets to match the outcomes mentioned in job descriptions
- Applying for roles you're genuinely a great fit for
Clients who've made these changes have gone from spending 100 hours on applications with zero interviews to landing first-round calls predictably in a fraction of the time.
You can learn more about all that in this video or previous issues of my newsletter.
This is my last newsletter for 2025.
40 issues this year. Jam packed with tips, frameworks, data, and stories.
I love helping the 1,000+ of you on your career journeys. If we’ve worked directly together, then you’ve hopefully felt that passion. And I want to thank you, again!
I’ve been spending this holiday season doing strategy planning for 2026 and am cooking up more ways to help even more PMs win in their careers.
Up next will be a workshop on LinkedIn that I mentioned a few weeks ago.
Learn about it here.