“Out of work for 18 months, he burst into tears:” How new career platform Hike gets your CV noticed in a broken job market
How to beat AI recruitment filters and get honest feedback on your CV and interview style
You’ve done everything right. Well, that’s what it feels like.
You’ve spent hours tailoring your CV, copy-pasting keywords from the job description, running it through ChatGPT for a polish, and firing it off with quiet confidence. Then, nothing. No acknowledgement, no rejection, just silence. Sound familiar?
According to one recruitment professional, you may have unknowingly walked straight into a trap, like thousands of others.
As AI-generated applications flood inboxes at an unprecedented rate, hiring managers are increasingly turning to aggressive automated filtering software to cope with the sheer volume. The result?
- Those lovingly keyword-stuffed, AI-polished CVs are often the first to be auto-rejected
- Talented, qualified professionals are left stranded in a digital void, wondering what on earth they’re doing wrong
It’s a frustrating, demoralising cycle that is quietly affecting job seekers across the board. But a new career and CV-enhancing platform, currently in Beta, is giving trial users a way to fight back — helping them cut through the noise, beat the filters, and reclaim genuine control over their employability and career trajectory.
Katherine Steiner-Dicks speaks to Hike founders Gavin Traylor and Graeme Goulden to find out how their approach is turning the job application nightmare into something far more hopeful.
Read this article to discover:
- Why generic AI actively damages the applications of job seekers and freelancers
- How to dig up brilliant, forgotten skills from your past projects
- The trick to getting real feedback when companies choose to ignore you
- Why a single, multi-purpose CV dooms your contract negotiations
What is AI flattening in recruitment?
If you are firing off applications into an endless black hole, the recruitment machine is broken (from both sides). Standard artificial intelligence promises to smooth out your career history, but it secretly ruins your chances. Experienced recruiter and co-founder of the platform Hike, Gavin Traylor, warns of a phenomenon called “AI flattening”:
A candidate only sees their CV… everyone’s using generic AI to optimise their CV, but what hiring managers are seeing is the exact same sentences in CVs now. All CVs are looking the same.
When every freelancer uses identical algorithmic prompts, original achievements vanish entirely. Frustrated employers see carbon copies, rely on cold keyword matching, or choose to ghost you. Internal data reveals that only 0.86% of generic applications come from truly great candidates. The remaining 99.14% is pure noise.
Gavin recently met a senior business development executive who had been jobless for 18 months. The man’s experience was stellar, yet his CV kept failing to get noticed.
“When we were working together, he actually broke down in tears, because somebody was there to support him,” Gavin shares.
Teasing out the hidden talents you routinely forget
To rescue candidates from this cold system, Gavin and his co-founder and career portfolio freelancer Graeme Goulden built Hike. Currently in beta testing, this platform rejects generic, robotic text. Instead, it functions as a personal “Career Sherpa”.
The data engine interprets any document, even a messy wall of text. It benchmarks your history against current job demands. Once the system is familiar with your work history and skills, it also alerts you to future hiring trends so you can get ahead of the competition and build up in-demand skills.
This is particularly useful for people with portfolio careers. That’s because freelancers adapt quickly and absorb massive skill sets across different assignments. Sadly, they often leave these inherent traits off their CV because the work feels like second nature. Hike uncovers these invisible gaps.
Here, Graeme explains:
The system identifies a need that isn’t called out as being addressed in the CV. The user says, ‘I’ve got that experience!’ Hype catches where those skills are missing and puts them front and centre.
Instead of rewriting your history into artificial prose, Hike talks to you. It pulls out real success stories. It optimises your profile using your own unique vocabulary, ensuring you stand out naturally.
From redundancy to choice: A real-world success story
The founders stress that their proprietary approach uncovers hidden paths that traditional automated systems completely miss. Graeme points to a recent user success story from the Northeast of England to prove the point:
“A guy who was working in student services at the University of Newcastle was made redundant. [He told us] he spent a lot of time applying because he wasn’t sure what skills his former role gave him. He just felt like he had to stay in education. However, when he was using Hike, it was teasing out what it meant to work in that role in a way that he had never really considered.”
By shifting away from robotic keywords and focusing on true transferable skills, the candidate completely flipped his job hunt. Graeme shares what happened next:
On the back of using Hike, he ended up getting two job offers. One was at a university and the other was in social enterprise, something that he would never have considered… he ended up going for the less expected opportunity in social enterprise.
And he’s loving it.
Smart tools to reclaim control of your career
Hike’s founders claim its platform can flip the old, broken process on its head. The beta platform includes custom tools built to give you power back:
| Feature | How does it work? | What’s the benefit to users? |
| Unlimited Job Fit Analysis | Benchmarks your profile against any active job URL | Gives an honest mirror on your CV before you apply |
| Predictive Skill Scanning | Scans the horizon for emerging industry trends | Gives a tap on the shoulder to learn skills early |
| Automated Anti-Ghosting | Evaluates a job URL after employer silence | Explains the structural reason your application stalled |
| Interview Transcript Reviews | Integrates directly with Zoom or Google Meets | Delivers objective data on how to perform better next time |
| Daily Smart Matching | Selects five highly tailored roles every 24 hours | Cuts through job board chaos by explaining exactly why you fit |
Stop mixing your worker status: A lesson for freelancers and fixed-term contractors
If you want to move between contract assignments and permanent roles, you face a major trap. You cannot use a compromise CV for both markets. Gavin recalls a contractor who struggled for months because his CV straddled both worlds:
The hiring manager thinks, ‘If this guy gets an £800 day rate, he’s gone.’ You must separate things out, burn the boats, and decide.
Hike manages these different professional identities. It draws from a central pool of personal data to build specific CV variants.
Backed by human science and a cracking advisory board
Though highly technical, Hike relies on human psychology. The founders work with internal organisational psychologists and an elite advisory board. This panel includes the Vice Dean of Manchester Business School and a former UK Minister of Employment.
The isolation of the modern job search remains a significant hurdle for many candidates. Gavin and Graeme designed Hike to combat this loneliness, describing the platform’s role as a supportive companion through a difficult process.
To illustrate the systemic problem, the founders map out two distinct pathways facing today’s workforce:
- The Standard Route ──> Spray and Pray ──> Robotic AI Flattening ──> The Rejection Void
- The Hike Strategy ──> Career Sherpa ──> Unique Proprietary CV ──> Honest Feedback & Offers
Hike’s beta platform currently operates globally, supporting candidates across the UK, Europe, and North America. For a membership fee, which will be lower than, say, a Spotify membership each month, the founders aim to steer applicants away from generic templates and toward a more tailored method of career management. Their focus now is B2C, where they feel there is a gap in the market. However, in future, they will build B2B offerings.
