A community health officer from Kumasi came to me last year with her CV and a question I hear often: "Patrick, I've applied to four WHO postings in two years and I haven't had a single callback. What's wrong with me?"
I read through her CV. Nine years of experience. A postgraduate diploma in public health. Supervised a team of twelve. Managed a health promotion programme that reached four districts. Nothing wrong with her at all.
Everything wrong with how her CV described it.
She was writing in GHS English. WHO reads in WHO English. Those are not the same language — and the gap between them is why thousands of qualified Ghanaian health professionals never hear back from international organisations.
How WHO actually filters applications
Before a human recruiter sees your CV, it goes through WHO's e-Recruitment system. This system scores applications against the job posting — specifically, it looks for language overlap between your CV and the posting text.
Here is an example from an actual WHO posting for a Health Systems Strengthening Consultant at the NOB level:
"Strengthen national health systems through capacity building and technical assistance to the Ministry of Health. Support the development and implementation of health workforce development strategies. Facilitate multi-sectoral coordination mechanisms..."
If your CV says "managed district health programmes and coordinated with MOH" — you are describing the same work. But "multi-sectoral coordination mechanisms" and "coordinated with MOH" are different strings to an ATS. The system scores you lower, and your application may never reach a human.
This is not unfair. It is just how the system works. And once you understand it, it is very easy to use in your favour.
The five patterns I see most often
1. A profile summary that could belong to anyone
Most CVs I receive open with something like: "Dynamic and results-oriented public health professional with over 8 years of experience seeking to contribute to a reputable organisation."
This sentence is doing almost nothing. It tells WHO nothing specific about you, it contains none of the keywords from the posting, and it is identical to thousands of other summaries in the system.
Compare this to: "Public health programme specialist with 8 years of experience in health systems strengthening, community-based RMNCAH service delivery, and district-level health data management across the Northern and Upper West Regions of Ghana. Experienced in multi-sectoral coordination with MOH, GHS, and international NGO partners."
Same experience. But the second version uses WHO's actual vocabulary — health systems strengthening, multi-sectoral coordination, RMNCAH — because the candidate took those terms directly from the posting and used them where they honestly described her work.
2. Duties instead of evidence
Duty-based: "Responsible for district health data collection and reporting to the regional health directorate."
Evidence-based: "Led DHIMS2 data collection and reporting for Tamale Metropolitan District across 14 sub-districts, improving data completeness from 61% to 89% over 18 months — the highest improvement rate in the Northern Region."
The first tells WHO what your job required. The second tells WHO what you actually did. WHO wants the second. Specifically, WHO wants numbers. In almost ten years of reviewing CVs, the single most common gap I see is the complete absence of numbers in the work experience section.
3. The wrong format for WHO's system
WHO's system parses CVs in a specific way. It expects:
- A professional summary or profile at the top
- Work experience in reverse chronological order
- Clear start and end dates for every role (month and year)
- Education section with institution names and graduation years
What it struggles with: tables, text boxes, columns, graphics, headers and footers. Many of the nicely designed CVs I see — the ones with coloured sidebars and icons — are actually worse for WHO applications because the ATS cannot parse the information correctly.
For WHO: plain formatting. Single column. Standard headings. No graphics.
4. Length that works against you
WHO guidance recommends a maximum of two pages for most positions, and three pages for senior roles with extensive experience. The average CV I receive from a mid-career health professional is four to six pages.
A long CV is not evidence of experience. It is evidence that you haven't prioritised. An ATS may only score the first portion of a document. A human recruiter skimming fifty CVs will spend less time on a longer one, not more.
5. A generic skills section
Most skills sections I see look like this: Microsoft Office, Team Leadership, Communication, Problem Solving, Analytical Skills.
A skills section for a WHO application should look like this: DHIMS2, KOBO Collect, ODK, SPSS, Health Systems Strengthening, RMNCAH Service Delivery, Community Health Programming, Monitoring and Evaluation, Data Quality Audits, Capacity Building and Training.
The second is scannable, relevant, and uses the exact vocabulary that appears in WHO job postings. The first could have been written by anyone applying for any job anywhere.
The keyword exercise that takes twenty minutes
Before you apply for any WHO role, do this:
- Open the job posting and copy the full text into a document.
- Read through it and highlight every specific term, phrase, or skill they mention in the duties and required qualifications sections.
- Go through your CV and ask, for each highlighted phrase: does my CV use this language, or something close to it, where it honestly applies to my work?
- Where the answer is no — rewrite the relevant CV entry to use that language.
This is not fabricating experience. It is describing your real experience in the vocabulary of the organisation you're applying to. You are almost certainly doing the work they're describing — you just haven't been calling it what they call it.
One important note: "community engagement" and "community mobilisation" are different words but describe overlapping work. Use the specific term from the posting. "Multi-sectoral coordination" is more specific than "stakeholder coordination". "Health workforce development" is more specific than "training staff". Use their words.
The summary is your first thirty seconds
The profile summary at the top of your CV is the first thing a recruiter reads if your application clears the ATS. It should do three things:
- State your specific area of expertise in WHO terms
- Give your years of experience in the relevant domain
- Name the geographic scope or sector context of that experience
And it should be different for different postings. A summary written for a Health Systems Strengthening role should use different language than a summary written for an RMNCAH programme role — even if the same experience underlies both. This takes ten minutes per application and it matters.
What actually changes when you get this right
The community health officer from Kumasi — the one who came to me after four failed applications. We rewrote her CV together. Not her experience. Her language.
We went through every entry and replaced duty language with outcome language. We rewrote her summary to mirror the vocabulary in the specific posting she was targeting. We restructured her skills section around the technical terms that appeared in WHO postings for her profile.
She applied to a WHO posting for a Community Health Specialist at the NOB level. She got a callback within three weeks.
Her experience hadn't changed. Her CV had.
If you've been applying to WHO or international health organisations and not hearing back, I'd encourage you to do the keyword exercise above on your most recent application. You'll likely find the gap immediately.
If you want someone to do that work with you — specifically, against an actual posting you're targeting — that's the core of what we do at MasterCV.