Executive CV Diagnostic · £245
Your CV isn't being rejected. It's being screened out.
Senior roles don't go to the most qualified candidate. They go to the candidate whose documentation removes risk fastest. A forensic 45-minute audit from an international headhunter with thirty years of board-level placement experience — and thirty thousand logged hours of negotiation on the hiring side.
Secure your audit — £245 →Pre-paid. No discovery call required. Immediate diary access after checkout.
The diagnosis
The real reason for search silence.
The industry tells you it's an ATS problem — keywords, formatting, parsing failures. That's a convenient story for CV writers who sell templates.
The reality at director level and above is different. The overwhelming majority of senior rejections are manual decisions, made by a human being who spent fewer than eight seconds on your document. They're not scanning for keywords. They're scanning for risk.
Three questions, answered or not answered, in that first glance. Does this person actually operate at the level we need? Where is the evidence of commercial impact? Would appointing them be defensible to the rest of the board?
If your first page doesn't resolve those questions — and candidly, most don't — you receive a polite decline that has nothing to do with your capability. That's the information asymmetry at work. It is fixable.
The difference
A CV writer optimises layout. A headhunter optimises the decision.
Most CV services are run by copywriters, not practitioners. They'll improve your formatting, tighten your language, maybe add a "personal brand statement." Useful enough work. But it misses the point entirely.
I've spent thirty years on the hiring side of the table — leading executive searches, sitting in shortlisting meetings, advising on C-suite appointments across multiple geographies. That isn't a line on a website. It's the reason I can tell you, in specific terms, why a particular document isn't progressing. And what the hiring side actually needs to see before they'll move you forward.
This audit doesn't make your CV "nicer." It restructures the entire document around the decision the reader is trying to make. There's a meaningful difference between those two things.
Deliverables
What you leave with.
This is not a feedback session. It is a working audit. You leave with tangible, defensible assets you can deploy immediately.
Deliverable 01
Five-Point Risk Score
A forensic assessment against the five criteria the hiring side actually evaluates: positioning clarity, scope and scale, proof density, credibility under interrogation, and signal-to-noise ratio. Scored. Annotated. Actionable.
Deliverable 02
Page-One Reconstruction
We rebuild the top half of page one during the session. Your level, your commercial weight, and your value proposition — visible in the first scan. Live. Not templated.
Deliverable 03
Evidence Bullet Formula
The exact framework used in executive search documentation. You will build four to six quantified achievement statements that are defensible under interview pressure. No invented metrics. No inflated language.
Deliverable 04
Screening Hygiene Check
A clean structure that reads fast and behaves reliably across screening workflows — human and automated. No gimmicks, no design risk, no formatting that breaks in transit.
The process
How the audit works.
Pre-Session Audit · 30 minutes
I review your CV and target role before we speak. Not a skim — a structured assessment against the five-point risk framework. We start the session with a diagnosis, not a discovery.
Live Working Session · 45 minutes
Zoom. Screen-shared. Live edits, hard decisions, and narrative reconstruction. We rebuild page one and produce your evidence bullet formula in real time.
Fix Map Debrief · Within 1 business day
Your annotated risk score and Fix Map, delivered as a working document. Every recommendation is specific, prioritised, and executable without further assistance.
Proof discipline
We don't invent metrics. Everything in your document must survive five minutes of interrogation in a live interview. Where evidence is missing, we mark it — and I tell you exactly what data points you need to gather before your next application.
In practice
The difference, in practice.
A real example of what changes when you move from role-description to decision-ready evidence.
Before · Common · Plausible · Weak
Led transformation programme across finance and operations.
After · Decision-ready · Defensible
Led finance and operations transformation across six countries, fourteen sites (£240m cost base; £8.5m programme budget), redesigning order-to-cash and procure-to-pay workflows. Quantified result: £12.4m run-rate benefit, nineteen-day cash conversion cycle improvement within twelve months.
You're not adding metrics. You're selecting evidence that already exists in your career — and structuring it so the reader's decision becomes obvious.
Who conducts your audit
The principal-led model.
Mark Ross Roberts
FMVA, CBCA · Founder and Principal
Mark Ross Roberts has spent three decades in international executive search and senior advisory. Not writing CVs — making hiring decisions. Thirty thousand logged hours of board-level negotiations. Ten thousand logged coaching hours. Four published books on executive positioning and career strategy.
His background in cross-border senior advisory is what opens doors other headhunters cannot reach: direct access to the unadvertised executive market through relationships built across decades of international work. Currently completing the Wharton Executive Presence and Leadership programme, alongside Neuroscience in Leadership.
The principal-led model means Mark works with you directly. No delegation. No junior associates. No outsourced delivery.
Get started
Your next mandate is forty-five minutes away.
Every week of search silence is a week of lost leverage. The gap between your capability and your market visibility is a solvable problem. It takes forty-five minutes and costs less than a single morning of lost billing.
Eight strategic audits opened per month
100% confidential · Secured by Stripe · Immediate diary access after checkout