From the Diary of Margaret Buj

How a recruiter who has coached more than 1,000 job seekers works out where a strong candidate’s search is actually breaking down.

“You’ve rewritten your resume three times. Your application results haven’t changed.” That’s how Margaret Buj opened a recent post to her LinkedIn followers, and the advice that followed ran against the instinct most people have at that point. “At some point, I would stop editing the resume. Not because the resume is definitely good. Because you now need to know whether the resume is actually the problem.”

She has watched the other side of that decision for a long time. She’s been recruiting since 2005 and coaching since 2006, and one search she ran, for a Customer Success role, drew around 600 applications. Roughly 100 of those people looked capable of doing the job. She interviewed about 15. “Many credible people didn’t get an interview,” she says. Her numbers are not unusual. SmartRecruiters’ 2025 benchmark, built on 89 million applications, found that in the United Kingdom 4.3 per cent of applicants are interviewed and 1.1 per cent receive an offer.

Margaret is an interview coach and career strategist, the founder of Interview Coach Ltd, and Principal Recruiter at Mixmax. The reader she has in mind is the experienced professional with a strong track record that isn’t showing up in their search, and what she does with that person first is not a rewrite. It’s finding out which part of the search has stalled. “Sometimes your CV needs work,” she says. “Sometimes the bigger issue is your target roles, how you approach employers, or the evidence you give in interviews.”

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What Margaret Asks For Before the First Conversation

Before a consultation, she asks for the person’s CV and at least a couple of job descriptions, often several, because the range of roles someone is considering tells her a lot. She doesn’t assess the CV on its own. “Sometimes a CV looks strong until I see the roles the person is applying for,” she says. “Then it becomes clear that the experience being emphasised doesn’t match the employer’s priorities, or that the level of responsibility required isn’t being demonstrated.” A well-written CV, as she puts it, can still leave the reader asking why this person is right for this particular job.

She reviews LinkedIn and establishes what has been happening in the search: what they’re applying for, how they’re finding opportunities, what response they’re getting and where processes tend to end. She asks about feedback, while recognising that candidates don’t always receive anything useful.

Then the attention narrows to one stage. If someone rarely gets interviews, she examines the fit between their experience and their target roles, the evidence in the CV and LinkedIn, and how they’re reaching employers. If recruiter conversations don’t lead to hiring-manager interviews, she wants to understand how they explain their background, what they want next and why the role makes sense. If they get interviews but don’t progress, she listens to their answers: whether they answer the question, demonstrate the required level of responsibility and make their decisions and results clear. If they regularly reach final stages, the two of them look at the specific concerns that may be affecting decisions, rather than assuming the whole search needs rebuilding.

“These are starting points for investigation, not automatic diagnoses,” she says. She also separates what the candidate can influence from what they can’t. A hiring freeze, a changed brief or a stronger match in the final shortlist can decide the outcome. “A rejection doesn’t automatically mean someone made a mistake.”

“The purpose is to give the person a clear priority and a reason for it, so they can stop making changes at random.”

Margaret Buj, interview coach and career strategist, Interview Coach Ltd

One client arrived with the interview already secured and a problem of a different shape.

The Interview That Felt Like a Memory Test

A senior marketing client had substantial experience, but found interviews difficult because her examples were complex and hard to explain under pressure. She described interviews as feeling like a memory test, and as the list of possible questions grew, she felt increasingly overwhelmed.

Her immediate need, Margaret says, was to make the experience she already had easier to access and explain. They narrowed the preparation to priority questions and a manageable set of strong examples, and worked on how she explained her decisions, her personal contribution and the results, “rather than spending most of an answer establishing the background.”

There was a positioning problem as well. Much of the client’s experience came from regulated, public-interest environments, and she was interviewing for a more commercially focused marketing role. “We needed to explain the relevance of her audience planning, budget decisions, measurement and stakeholder leadership without pretending she had worked against sales targets she had never owned,” Margaret says. They distinguished the behaviour-change outcomes the client had actually measured from the revenue and pipeline measures she might use in a different business, which let her show relevant judgement while staying accurate about her record.

The client later reported feeling more confident and more comfortable answering questions without relying on a rehearsed answer. She secured the role. “Giving her another long list of questions to memorise would have added to the problem,” Margaret says. “She needed a more focused way to prepare and use the experience she already had.”

A second client illustrates, in Margaret’s words, a different intervention.

Six Processes at Once

An experienced Customer Success leader came to her with a CV that contained strong experience, but parts of it were highly technical and focused on responsibilities. His commercial contribution and leadership needed to be more immediately visible for the senior Customer Success opportunities he was pursuing.

“The evidence was already there,” Margaret says: team leadership, revenue growth, customer adoption and senior enterprise relationships. “The work was about making that evidence easier to recognise and connecting it more clearly to his target roles.” Following her feedback, he updated both his CV and his LinkedIn profile and began using the revised CV. He subsequently emailed to say he was in six recruitment processes at the same time. Just over a month after that update, he reported receiving an offer.

She’s careful about what that proves. “I wouldn’t claim that a CV review alone determined the hiring decision. He still had to go through the interviews and demonstrate his suitability. But we have a clear account of what he changed and what happened afterwards.”

“That is why I don’t begin with the assumption that everyone needs the same service. The work needs to address the part of the search that is limiting their progress.”

Margaret, interview coach and career strategist, Interview Coach Ltd

She learned to look for that evidence on the hiring side of the table.

Twenty Years on the Hiring Side

Margaret has more than 20 years of global hiring experience across tech, product, marketing and business functions. She’s hired for Expedia, VMware, Avanade, Microsoft and Cisco through RPO, and for mid-size and high-growth companies including Box, King, Yieldify, Typeform and Mixmax. She began coaching in 2006, a year after she started recruiting, and took diplomas in personal performance coaching and in corporate and executive coaching at The Coaching Academy between 2008 and 2010.

At Typeform, as Senior Technical Recruiter, she personally hired 50 candidates in a single year, mostly in engineering and data science across several European locations, and set up an interview training and shadowing programme that trained more than 80 employees. She’s been at Mixmax since 2022 and Principal Recruiter there since 2023, leading recruitment in engineering, product and marketing across Europe, the US and LATAM. Alongside that, she spent two and a half years as a Career Success Manager with Kadima Careers, and names its CEO, Alan Stein, as a significant influence: “I learned a great deal from how he ran the business, and working predominantly with US clients during that period made me a better coach.”

The coaching side has its own record. Through Interview Coach Ltd she has coached more than 1,000 job seekers across the UK and internationally, from early career to senior leadership, and has trained hiring managers and recruiters at organisations including Cisco, Expedia, Photobox, the Government Legal Department, Typeform and Mixmax. Her career advice has been featured in Forbes, Business Insider and Fox Business.

The two sides meet in one question she keeps asking.

What the Title Doesn’t Tell You

“Recruiting has given me direct experience of how hiring teams distinguish between people who all look capable on paper,” she says. One recurring example from her hiring work involved senior and staff-level software engineering candidates. Some were technically strong and passed coding interviews, sometimes system design interviews too, but didn’t demonstrate the wider scope the position required. At staff level, the team also needed evidence of technical leadership across projects involving multiple teams. “Being able to solve a difficult technical problem didn’t, by itself, establish that someone could operate at that level.”

That shapes the questions she asks a client now. What decisions did they own? How did they influence other teams? What competing priorities did they handle? What changed because of their involvement?

“Sometimes the experience is there, but the answer concentrates so heavily on implementation that the interviewer never hears the leadership evidence. Sometimes there is a genuine gap. Those situations require different advice.”

Margaret, interview coach and career strategist, Interview Coach Ltd

Titles can obscure the picture too. She has seen managers with large teams, including team leads, whose responsibility was broader than that of someone with a director title elsewhere. What she wants a CV and an interview answer to show is the responsibility actually exercised: team structure, decision-making authority, business scope and accountability for results. “Keep the formal title accurate, but give the reader enough context to understand the level of the work.”

It comes down to a habit she describes in a sentence. “I keep asking what someone personally did and what changed as a result, because an interviewer needs to understand their contribution, not just the team’s achievement.”

Where Margaret Is Now

Margaret’s coaching runs through Interview Coach Ltd, where readers can explore coaching, book a consultation and find Get Hired Faster, her self-paced course. This year she’s launching a live group edition of Get Hired Faster, where participants get direct feedback on their positioning, CV, LinkedIn and job-search approach, alongside access to the course. For someone who wants to know what’s stalling their own search, a consultation is where she starts. She continues as Principal Recruiter at Mixmax. Outside work, she loves travelling and makes time for it.

The advice she gives before any of that is the line she’d choose to own. “Before you rewrite your CV again, find out where your job search is breaking down.”

Five Reflections from Margaret

Where is the search breaking down? Someone who gets very few interviews has a different problem to investigate from someone who regularly reaches the final stage.
Is the document the problem, or the target? A well-written CV aimed at the wrong jobs will still produce disappointing results.
Is the stretch believable? Companies aren’t hiring based on encouragement. They’re hiring based on risk, and the move has to be one you can justify with evidence.
What did you personally do, and what changed? An interviewer needs to understand your contribution, not just the team’s achievement.
Was it you, or the brief? A hiring freeze, a changed brief or a stronger match on the shortlist can decide the outcome, and a rejection doesn’t automatically mean you made a mistake.