Shadow CV
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About Shadow CV

Shadow CV shows UK job seekers what applicant tracking software sees when it reads their CV, and fixes what it finds.

Who runs Shadow CV

Shadow CV is built and run by Scott Bradley, trading as RavenFrost Labs, a sole trader based in London. Scott authors the guides on the Shadow CV blog and the cover letter guides.

The idea is simple. Most large employers now put every application through an applicant tracking system (ATS) before a person reads it, and job seekers never get to see what that software made of their CV. Shadow CV shows you.

How the ATS score works

When you upload a CV, Shadow CV extracts its text the way an ATS does, then scores it against the keywords employers use for your target role. The analysis is carried out by Anthropic's Claude model, instructed to behave like the parsers in Workday, Greenhouse, Lever and iCIMS: reading literally, left to right and top to bottom, with no guessing at what you meant.

  • Keywords. Your CV is checked against a list of critical, important and nice-to-have terms for the role and seniority you choose. Matching is by exact term or close variant, not synonym, because that is how most ATS search works.
  • Formatting. Columns, tables, text boxes, headers and footers, and unusual bullet characters are flagged when they would scramble or hide your text.
  • Structure. The check looks for the sections a parser expects: contact details, a professional title, work experience, education and skills.

These three parts combine into a score out of 100. The scoring is deliberately strict: 70 or more is hard to reach without deliberate work, and a first scan is calibrated to stay at or below 85.

What the score is not

Shadow CV is not connected to any employer's system and is not affiliated with any ATS provider. The score is a simulation of how these systems typically parse and rank a CV, not a prediction of any single employer's decision. Each employer configures its own requirements, and most systems rank and search applications rather than automatically rejecting them.

The £5 rewrite never invents experience, skills or qualifications. It restructures and rephrases what is already in your CV, and adds missing keywords only where your existing experience supports them.

How the guides are researched

The blog is written for UK job seekers. Statistics are checked against their primary source, such as GOV.UK, a regulator or the organisation that ran the research, and that source is named or linked in the post. Where only US or global data exists, the post says so. Each guide shows the date it was published, and is updated when the facts behind it change.

Your CV and your data

Your uploaded CV file is processed in-session and never stored on our servers. We keep your analysis results and, if you buy a rewrite, the rewritten version, in private storage for you to download. The privacy policy explains exactly what is kept and for how long.

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