Reference
The words, defined the way we use them.
Career language is unusually slippery: the same word means different things to a search partner, a hiring board and a CV writer. These are the definitions this site is written against.
Free referenceNo email requiredWeights included
The audit — dimensions and weights10
The record — how it reads5
The pack — what gets built6
The market — who is reading4
FilterableNothing gated
The glossary
Filter by what you are trying to work out.
Every weight quoted here is the published one, fixed and identical for every record we read.
| Term | What it means here |
|---|---|
| Profile Signal Index | Seven weighted dimensions resolved into a single figure out of 100. Not a pass mark, not a ranking against other candidates, and not a traffic light. The number is the short answer; the three pages of prose behind it are the useful part. |
| Positioning | What the record says you are for, resolved in the first six lines a reader sees. The heaviest dimension at 36 per cent — more than the next two combined. |
| Market alignment | Whether the record uses the language the market currently uses for roles at your level. 18 per cent. Not keyword matching: being legible to the people who wrote the advert. |
| Ownership depth | Whether each claim names what you held, decided and changed, or only what you were near. 12 per cent. |
| Evidence | Whether a claim can be traced to something specific you did. 10 per cent. Not whether it is impressive — whether it is checkable. |
| Role alignment | How the same record reads against each named target role. 10 per cent, scored per target. On the published composite one record scored 72, 61 and 54 against three different titles. |
| Seniority calibration | Whether the record reads at the level you actually operated at. 8 per cent. Records drift downward far more often than up. |
| CV–LinkedIn consistency | Whether the two documents a reader opens within a minute of each other tell the same story. The lightest weight at 6 per cent, and the one flaw a reader cannot un-see once found. |
| Signal band | The written characterisation of where a dimension currently sits. Bands are prose, not colours — there is no red, amber or green anywhere in a CVPRO audit. |
| Illustrative composite | A constructed persona used to demonstrate the method. Every example published on this site is one. We do not publish client material, anonymised or otherwise. |
| Proximity verb | Managed, oversaw, responsible for. Verbs that place you next to a decision rather than inside it. None are untrue; all are read as one level below the job you did. |
| Sized claim | A claim carrying the unit its reader counts in — currency, headcount, sites, period. An unsized claim is read at the smaller end of its plausible range, every time. |
| Span | The surface you carried: geography, headcount, revenue, sites, cost base. Distinct from authority, which is what you could decide about it. |
| Operating rhythm | What was reviewed, how often, and what triggered escalation. The closest operating analogue to how a board itself works, which is why it reads well upward. |
| Governance read | Reading a record for judgement rather than capacity. A board asks what you can judge; an operating hirer asks what you can run. The same career answers both, in different order. |
| Evidence register | A spreadsheet with one row per claim and the source that carries it. The other fifteen deliverables read from it, which is why they never contradict each other. |
| ATS master résumé | The full record, parsed cleanly, with every claim traced. The master file from which any target-role variant is cut. |
| Target-role variant | A résumé cut to one named role from the same master. Because both derive from one evidence base, the two documents cannot quietly disagree about what you did. |
| Opportunity radar | Role clusters plotted around your record, nearest first. Ships in the CareerOS 360 Leadership scope as a spreadsheet. |
| Interview dossier | Questions by theme, each answer pointing at a numbered row in your evidence register, so preparation is rereading a source rather than reconstructing a memory. |
| Handover notes | How the pack was built and what to update after each role, so the record stays true without us. Ships in the CXO & Transition Advisory scope. |
| Search partner | An executive search firm acting for the employer. Worth remembering whose interests they carry: not yours. CVPRO takes no fee from any employer and shares nothing with them. |
| Mandate | The brief a board or search partner is actually working to, which is usually narrower and more specific than the advertised role. |
| NED | Non-executive director. A governance appointment, read for judgement and independence rather than for operating capacity. |
| Outplacement | Transition support funded by the departing employer. CVPRO handles cohort work at the same standard, and the individual remains the client of the writing. |
Two we deliberately do not use
Because both would be untrue.
Worth stating, since you will see them everywhere else.
“ATS-proof”
No document is. Applicant tracking systems differ, change without notice, and are configured per employer. We build an ATS Master Résumé that parses cleanly; we do not claim it defeats a system we have not seen.
“AI-powered”
Nothing automated reads your file. No parser, no scoring engine, no language model. One named reviewer opens every submission, which is why the audit takes a few working days rather than seconds.