Forty applications, no replies. The usual advice is to rewrite your resume, and people do, repeatedly, each time producing something a little different and hearing nothing again.
Before the fifth rewrite, it is worth ruling out the mechanical failures. They are quick to check, they are invisible if you do not look for them, and if one of them applies, no amount of rewriting will help, because the problem is not that your resume was judged and found wanting. It is that it never arrived in a readable state.
1. Can the software read it at all?
Open your resume and try to select a sentence with your mouse. If words highlight individually, there is real text. If a rectangle covers the whole block, your resume is an image, and every applicant tracking system receives a blank document.
This happens most often with resumes exported from design tools with the text flattened or outlined. The file looks perfect. It contains nothing.
2. Do your columns survive?
If your resume has a sidebar, this is the likeliest cause of silence. A parser reads across the page rather than down each column, so the left column's job title fuses to the right column's skill. Every line becomes a job title welded to something unrelated.
Quick check: select all the text, copy it, paste it into a plain text editor. What you see is roughly what a parser sees. The ATS checker does this precisely and shows both readings side by side. Full explanation in why two-column resumes break.
3. Is your email in the page header?
Many parsers crop the top and bottom margins before reading, assuming they contain page numbers. If your contact details live only in the header, your application arrives with no email address, and an application with no email address is frequently discarded outright, because there is no way to contact you.
4. Are your dates readable?
Recruiters filter on years of experience. If your dates are drawn as a graphical timeline, or sit only in a sidebar that scrambled, your candidate record has no employment history, and you are excluded from every filter that mentions experience, however much of it you have.
5. Are you using the employer's words?
Recruiters search their database by keyword. "Worked closely with senior leadership" is an excellent description of stakeholder management that will not be found by anyone searching for stakeholder management. You were not rejected; you were not in the results.
The keyword matcher shows which of a posting's terms are missing, weighted by how often it repeats them.
Once the mechanics are clean
If all five check out, the problem is genuinely elsewhere, and it is worth being honest about the possibilities rather than continuing to blame the document.
Volume and fit. Response rates on cold applications to large employers are low for everyone. If you are applying to roles where you meet perhaps half the requirements, forty applications is a small sample.
The route. Applications through a company's portal compete with hundreds. A referral, a message to the hiring manager, or an application in the first days after posting all change the odds considerably more than a resume rewrite does.
The top third. Recruiters read from the top and stop early. If the first third of your resume does not make the case for this specific role, the rest is rarely reached.
An unexplained gap or a mismatch. Worth addressing directly in a line rather than hoping it is not noticed.
None of that is comfortable, but it is at least actionable, and it is worth reaching only after ruling out the five checks above, which are free, take ten minutes, and are the reason a great many qualified people hear nothing at all.