It was 3 AM. My coffee was cold, my eyes were burning, and I was staring at yet another rejection email. “Your profile doesn’t quite match our current needs,” it read, for what felt like the hundredth time that month.
I’d spent the entire evening manually rewriting my CV for a senior developer position at a company I genuinely wanted to work for. I’d read through their 2,000-word job description, carefully mapped out the technical skills they mentioned, adjusted my experience descriptions to highlight relevant projects, and reordered my achievements to show impact in areas they cared about. Every. Single. Time.
Then came the rejection. And then another job posting caught my eye. And I had to do it all over again. And again.
This wasn’t just exhausting. This was broken.
The Math of Modern Job Hunting
Before I built CV Forge, I wanted to understand just how broken the process was. The numbers shocked me:
The average online job posting receives 250+ candidates, but only four to six of them will be invited to a formal interview. That’s a conversion rate of roughly 1-2%. Sobering.
But here’s what really got me: on average, recruiters spend 6-8 seconds reviewing each resume on their first pass. Six. To. Eight. Seconds.
In that razor-thin window, a recruiter needs to understand your relevance to their open position. And here’s the kicker: work experience which does not match the experience being asked for in the job advert is the cause of 73% of resume rejections.
The frustration wasn’t really with the recruiters or the ATS systems. It was with the fundamental inefficiency of the process. Job descriptions are specific. Requirements are precise. But most candidates (myself included) were sending generic CVs that made recruiters work hard to see the connection.
The Real Problem: Keyword Misalignment, Not Robot Rejection
There’s a lot of mythology around Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS). The widely cited “75% rejection rate” originated from a 2012 sales pitch by a company called Preptel, which went out of business in 2013, with no research methodology ever published to verify this claim.
The truth? Over 90% of submitted resumes are viewed at least once by human recruiters. The problem isn’t that robots are silently rejecting you. The problem is that 88% of employers believe they are losing out on highly qualified candidates who are screened out of hiring processes because they aren’t submitting resumes that align with the job requirements and keywords.
It’s not robot rejection. It’s human filtering based on relevance.
And the tools I needed to create that relevance didn’t exist. So I had to manually do it, every single time, while my motivation for the role slowly drained away.
The Breaking Point
Here’s what a typical week of job hunting looked like for me:
Monday: 9 AM – Find an interesting job posting. Spend 45 minutes reading the description, identifying keywords, understanding the company’s priorities. Update my CV to highlight relevant experience. Update the summary. Reorder achievements. Double-check formatting.
Tuesday: 1 PM – Find another posting. Different company, different tech stack, different focus. Repeat the entire process. But this time, I need to undo the changes I made for Monday’s application because they don’t fit.
Wednesday: 11 PM – Three more postings. More hours spent on CV tailoring. At this point, I’m so tired that I’m making mistakes. I’m second-guessing whether I should include this project or that skill.
Friday: Rejections start rolling in. Some are probably legitimate “not a good fit” rejections. Some? I genuinely wonder if the hiring manager ever really saw my CV in its best light.
By the time I got to the tenth application, I wasn’t thinking about the job anymore. I was thinking about the CV formatting. I was thinking about whether I’d optimized for the right keywords. My energy for actually wanting these roles had completely evaporated.
More than 9 in 10 job seekers (92%) never complete their applications. Now I understand why. It’s not because people don’t want the jobs. It’s because the process is soul-crushing.
An Idea at 2 AM
One night, after spending two hours tailoring a CV for a role I was genuinely excited about, I thought: “Why am I doing this manually?”
I’m a developer. I build tools for a living. I can parse job descriptions. I can extract keywords. I can map those keywords to relevant experience. I can generate tailored CVs. I can even generate them in multiple formats.
The next morning, I started building CV Forge.
What CV Forge Does
CV Forge is an MCP (Model Context Protocol) server that does what I’ve been doing manually: it automates the process of creating ATS-friendly, tailored CVs.
Here’s the workflow:
1. Parse Job Requirements
Give it a job description, and CV Forge extracts key skills, experience level requirements, company focus, and industry-specific keywords.
2. Generate Tailored CV
Combine your complete professional profile with the parsed job requirements, and CV Forge generates a CV that’s optimized for that specific role. It prioritizes relevant skills, highlights matching experience, and ensures keywords are naturally woven throughout.
3. Export in Multiple Formats
Generate PDFs, HTML, or Markdown versions. Because sometimes you need a professional PDF, sometimes you need a web version, and sometimes you need something editable.
All of this takes minutes instead of hours.
The Impact
Since I started using CV Forge myself, three things have changed:
First, I’ve applied to more jobs. Without spending 45 minutes tailoring each application, I can apply to 5-6 positions in the time it used to take me to apply to 1-2. That’s not hustling harder. That’s just removing the friction.
Second, my interview rate improved noticeably. When your CV actually demonstrates relevant experience in the language the hiring manager is looking for, they can see your fit faster. Candidates who include a link to an active LinkedIn profile get 71% more interviews than those who don’t. But I’d argue that a tailored CV that shows clear relevance probably has an even bigger impact.
Third, and maybe most importantly, I’m excited about jobs again. I’m not stressed about CV formatting. I’m not spending mental energy wondering if I’ve highlighted the right things. I’m thinking about whether I actually want to work at this company, doing this work, solving these problems.
The technical optimization is done. Now I can focus on the human part: Do I want this job?
The Philosophy Behind CV Forge
When I built this, I made some deliberate choices:
Transparency over black-box algorithms – You see exactly what keywords were extracted. You see which skills are being prioritized. No mysterious ATS scoring. No hidden algorithms. Just clear, understandable tailoring.
Keywords don’t replace substance – CV Forge doesn’t just stuff keywords into your CV. It intelligently highlights the relevant experience and achievements you already have. If you don’t have relevant experience, no tool can create it. But if you do, CV Forge makes sure it’s visible.
Multiple formats for a modern world – PDFs for traditional companies. HTML for personal websites. Markdown for developers who want to version control their CVs. Different opportunities need different formats.
Built by someone who gets the frustration – I didn’t build this from a theoretical understanding of recruiting. I built it because I was living the problem. Every feature is there because I needed it.
Why This Matters Now
More than 86% of recruiters agree that their ATS has reduced their overall time-to-hire. That’s great for companies. But it’s created a secondary effect: more automation means candidates need to be more precise.
The days of sending a generic CV to multiple companies are over. Not because recruiters are more demanding. But because the process is now transparent: either your CV clearly matches the role, or it doesn’t.
I didn’t want to just complain about that reality. I wanted to make it manageable.
The Bigger Picture
Here’s what I’ve learned: most job rejections aren’t because you’re not good enough. They’re because the fit wasn’t clear. Your relevant experience was buried under irrelevant details. Your perfect project was mentioned in the wrong section. You had the exact skill they needed, but you called it something different than what was in the job posting.
These are fixable problems. And they shouldn’t require hours of manual work to fix.
GitHub Repository
CV Forge is open source and available on GitHub. You can use it standalone, integrate it with Claude, or build it into your own job search workflows:
GitHub: https://github.com/thechandanbhagat/cv-forge
Feel free to:
- Clone the repository
- Use it as an MCP server with Claude
- Contribute improvements
- Report issues
- Fork and customize for your needs
What’s Next
This tool removes one critical friction point from the job search process. It gives you back the hours you would have spent manually tailoring CVs. More importantly, it gives you back the mental energy to think about what actually matters: finding work that excites you.
The Invitation
If you’ve been where I was at 3 AM, staring at another rejection email wondering if your CV even made it past the initial screening, CV Forge is for you.
Go ahead and use it. Build on it. Contribute to it. The job hunting process is broken enough without making it harder on yourself.
Because here’s the truth: you’re probably qualified for more jobs than your generic CV suggests. The missing piece isn’t your skill. It’s visibility.
Let’s fix that together.
References:
- Applicant Tracking System Statistics (Updated for 2025) – Select Software Reviews
- Resume statistics USA – The latest data for 2025 – Standout CV
- Applicant Tracking Systems Aren’t Excluding Job Applicants—People Are – Hiring Thing
- The ATS Resume Rejection Myth – The Interview Guys
- Debunking the Top 3 ATS Myths – Simplify
- Beat The ATS 2025 – Neeljym Search Group
