What a recruiter actually sees in the first 10 seconds of viewing your CV

Heatwave’s back. Aircon's arrived. It’s quiet, it’s cold, it’s perfect. I also, like hopefully a lot of you, stayed up to watch England march on to the World Cup Quarter Finals, buzzing, but knackered.

Ok, so the 10 second thing isn’t quite legit. Partly because I wanted you to read on and partly collaborating with the truth. A recruiter won’t read each CV in 10 seconds - but it will take that long to work out if they want to dig deeper into your CV. Think of arriving at the bar for a blind date, do you like what you see enough to want to know more, or have you already made your mind up? (Disclaimer that looks aren’t everything etc etc).

These first 10 seconds are vital and it isn’t because recruiters are lazy, but when you have a role with 300 plus applications, you need to be efficient with time and when you’re an experienced recruiter, you can scan through the core info in a rapid amount of time, to enable the majority of CVs to be viewed through human eyes (see my first blog post).

So, here is where my eyes go on a CV, in order.

1. Your most recent role - title and company. Long and short, if you’re applying to a Java Engineer role, are you a Java Engineer? And where have you been a Java Engineer most recently? You are a Java Engineer? Great, I keep reading. If you’re not and it’s not clear why, I may need to move on.

2. Dates. How long have you been in each role? Myth buster, gaps don’t bother most recruiters anywhere near as much as you may think. Things happen, redundancies happen, health happens, life happens. What I’m looking at is the pattern of length of service. Multiple 6 month stints in perm roles? It’s a question for me to find an answer to. One line can answer these questions often.

3. Location. Sounds simple, matters plenty. If the role is 3 days a week in London and you live in Stoke-on-Trent (big up Staffs Uni), that’s another question that will need answering. If you’re open to relocation or are in the process of it, mention that.

4. The CV format. When I’m scanning your CV, is it easy for me to extract this key info or am I going on a scavenger hunt? It’s not to say I won’t do that, but make the important stuff as easy as possible to find.

So these are the bits I’m looking for straight away. What am I not looking for?

Your personal statement. And, sorry, because it’s personal to you. I will likely read it once I’ve covered off the key info, but the fact that you’re ‘hard working and a great team player’ doesn't tell me anything. Most CVs say this, and if you aren’t those things, you’re not going to add ‘reasonably lazy and doesn’t play well with others’. Leave the generic stuff out, include key achievements and the impact it had on the business.

A photo of you, just don’t.

Fancy designs - maybe if you’re applying for a UX or Graphic Design role, but otherwise, it won’t harm your chances, but it equally isn’t needed.

Buzzwords, please don’t use words like synergy, ninja or dynamic. This isn’t Diary of a CEO (thank god). Plain english and impact, trump buzzwords everytime.

So, these are the things I look for and the things I don’t when scanning a CV. Obviously, they aren’t the only things I’ll read on your CV, but they are the things that make me want to dive deeper. Other recruiters might do it differently, you might think it’s a load of rubbish, let me know if you do, I’d love to hear.

It’s coming home.

This post is written by myself only, not AI. It won't be perfect.

The redundancy blame game

So, time for blog attempt number two.

Last time, I sat firmly in-front of my fan. Fan still going, albeit on a 2 light setting, not 5 lights. This is good. This is cooler. However, I’ve gone a step beyond this week and have a brand new portable aircon unit on order. Coming just in time for the next heatwave. Having a portable aircon pleases me, the cost of it does not. There’s also the environmental impact to consider - would I rather not have an aircon? Yes. Will I be desperately delighted at having it when the mercury hits above 30 degrees? Very much yes. But we’re on a green energy plan, recycle like there’s no tomorrow and I even use reusable straws so I’m hoping there’s a moral trade off.

I wanted to post something about redundancy.

10/15 years ago, it seemed like a bit of a mystical thing to me, or at least something that only happened to pre-historic organisations - like businesses that only made fax machines or a travel agent (delighted to see a few still going strong on the high street). But now, especially in Talent Acquisition, I won’t go a day on LinkedIn without seeing someone post that horrid green banner and then those magic words come out - Open to work.

It definitely isn’t mystical anymore. It definitely isn’t limited to an entire business product becoming obsolete. Nor does it only happen to one type of employee or one type of industry. It’s everywhere. I went through it myself. It’s crap.

For me, the hardest part is the responsibility. If you’re fired, there’s (usually) a very clear reason - performance or conduct. You at least know where to direct your blame, likely on yourself - though I appreciate there’s often nuance.

Maybe you’ve been forced out unfairly, or had a horrible boss, again, you know where to direct your blame - it doesn’t make it any nicer, but at least the blame or anger has a direction of travel.

When it comes to redundancy, more often than not, the blame becomes a void. It certainly isn’t your fault, you could blame org leadership for getting to this point, but often, there are so many circumstances that the blame game becomes impossible. 

You might be level headed and sensible and think ‘well what good does blame do anyway?’ You’d be right to think that, but for those having gone through redundancy, not having that rhyme or reason can be a really confusing emotion to deal with and it often results in you trying to blame yourself, wrongly.

So that’s the thing, above all and everything else, you are the one person absolutely not to blame in a redundancy process. Life can be tricky enough, let alone when going through something as stressful as a redundancy. Even though it sounds simple, don’t be hard on yourself. I’ve said it many times, but your self worth isn’t remotely reflected by a redundancy process, just like when you’re doing incredibly professionally, that also doesn’t determine your self worth.

Being a good person, treating other people kindly, being good to animals, saying thank you when the other car lets you through (regardless of who’s right of way it is) these are the things that determine your self worth (well to me anyway).

This post is written by myself only, not AI. It won't be perfect.

Are recruiters viewing my application or is it AI?

So I'm starting my first proper blog in the early stages of a blistering heatwave. I'm sat in front of a fan, a Shark fan to be precise. It's good, I mean really bloody good. I'm telling you this for no reason other than I currently tell anyone that will listen how good the Shark fans are, so why not add it to this blog too.

Stop asking me about this fan, I'm getting distracted. Let's talk AI in the recruitment process. I'm not talking about the future of AI, I'm not asking if it will take all our jobs and I'm not chucking in buzzwords like LLM or RAG to try and look smart (mainly because I'm smart adjacent) - I want to talk about what matters, who views your job application? A human or AI?

Does AI really reject your job application before a human sees it? In my experience, no.

This is what you see all over LinkedIn, partly from frustrated job hunters (no judgement, I've completely been there) and partly from AI 'experts' that in actual fact are nothing to do with recruitment and have never even heard of an ATS. Being honest, it feels plausible - most ATS' are going big on AI tooling and AI exists to reduce manual work for humans, so why wouldn't it cut out the sifting process for a recruiter?

Actually, I've just caught myself here. An ATS is an Applicant Tracking System, like Workable, Greenhouse or Teamtailor (big up Teamtailor - one of the best in the business). So, long and short, when you apply for a role, the recruiter goes to the relevant role on the ATS and starts sifting through applications.

Now, most recruiters, well, the good ones (and there's loads) want to find suitable candidates, not just look to eliminate them. Yes, it will vary depending on things like company size and employer branding as to how many applications you get. It could be 13 applications, it could be 513 applications. The volume changes, but the task remains, find suitable candidates amongst them.

The first thing the recruiter will look to do is rule out applications that just won't work. For example, if the business has no visa sponsorship license, unfortunately all applicants that require sponsorship will be rejected - that volume has just reduced, maybe to 6, maybe to 306, but we're getting there. From there, they aren't then reading every CV cover to cover, but looking for evidence that you match the job spec - job title, experience, industry alignment - things that can be picked out incredibly quickly.

Next step, is to start viewing, yes literally viewing applications/CVs, AI could come into the frame here as some ATS' will be able to rank applications based on suitability to required skills to the role. This is where I think the confusion comes from. People see AI rankings etc. and assume that it's making decisions. Ranking candidates and rejecting them are two very different things. AI is a starting point, not a final outcome. It doesn't mean that if your CV isn't ranked, it won't be viewed. Any decent recruiter and any environments that I've worked in, we would view pretty much every application from here. Recruiters are incredibly well versed in viewing a CV and assessing suitability in an incredibly quick amount of time. Some roles have more nuance and take longer, some recruiters just have more capacity and can go more in-depth - but ultimately, if you look a suitable fit, a recruiter will find that, very quickly.

Recruiters spend hours and hours (and hours and hours) viewing CVs - AI tools will help rank, help sift, help assess but that's exactly what they are, tools.

Believe it or not, recruiters, much like you, f*ck up. They might miss an application, they might reject someone that shouldn't be rejected, but they really aren't in the business of rejecting suitable candidates for a laugh. That would be mental and frankly, a massive waste of time.

It's really annoying when you get an auto reject from a role you look absolutely bang on for, I know, it happened to me literally this morning.

My first thought wasn't 'AI has rejected me'

It was 'What have they seen that I haven't?'

Maybe they've spent longer in the specific industry or maybe, there's just someone that's a better fit. It's bloody annoying, but it's recruitment.

Agree? Disagree? Want a recommendation on a damn good fan? Let me know!

d to me literally this morning.

My first thought wasn't 'AI has rejected me'

It was 'What have they seen that I haven't?'

Maybe they've spent longer in the specifc industry or maybe, there's just someone that's a better fit. It's bloody annoying, but it's recruitment.

Agree? Disagree? Want a recommendation on a damn good fan? Let me know!

This post was not written using AI, I mean if AI came up with this, all our jobs are safe. It was however boosted by spellcheck.