Avoid employing unlucky people – throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them. (David Brent)
The UK recruitment industry turns over approximately 27 billion pounds a year in the UK (most likely pre credit-crunch times though). That would tend to suggest that most employment or contract vacancies are filled through agencies. That’s an incredible number of posts filled by recruitment agents. The industry is extremely competitive and agencies want to be the first to find the ideal candidate and get their CV introduced to a potential client before any other agency beats them to it. IT recruitment in particular is a very busy segment of the market and the content of this article probably applies more to technical professions because they’re filled with jargon and technical keywords.
So how do the agencies find the ideal candidate as efficiently as possible?
Well for starters, most agencies will keep a database of CV’s that have been submitted by candidates recently or in the past. There are also job boards, such as Jobsite, Jobserve and Monster (in the UK) where candidates are able to upload a copy of their CV and apply for positions directly from the job board website. Candidates may also make their CV available to be searched by recruiters via the job board.
The key concept here is that agencies search a database for your CV. Whether its their own in-house database that has been built up over time or a job board database, the agency is forming a query and executing a search to retrieve a list of candidates. That might be an obvious point to make, but if its so obvious then why don’t we make use of it.
Keywords
In my case, I am an ASP.NET programmer, so as a minimum, I would ensure that my CV is focused on the core .NET keywords and closely related technologies: ASP.NET, .NET 3.5, C#, VB.NET, SQL Server, LINQ.
Don’t forget little things like version numbers. The “3.5” in there might just make the difference… I’m a practical, common sense driven programmer and I might know that a hiring senior-developer worth their salt could figure out that LINQ would imply that I am familiar with .NET Framework 3.5. However, most recruitment agents are not technical and you can probably bet that if they have a brief from their client that mentions ASP.NET 3.5, they will be searching for “ASP.NET 3.5”. If your CV mentions “3.5” and another one in their database doesn’t, then you can probably also bet that if they were displayed in a list on the recruiters screen, the CV with “3.5” in it is going to be higher up in the list…
Most candidates are probably going to mention their core competencies in their CV and one focused solely on “.NET”, “ASP.NET”, “3.5”, “HTML”, “CSS”, “XML” is probably going to be pretty common among the thousands of others that mention the same general skill-set. This is where its worth dropping in names of more specific products that you’ve worked with where you applied your core skills. For example, you may have worked with object-relational mapping technologies like NHibernate and SubSonic, or web content management systems like Sitecore, Interwoven or Umbraco – mention them! Most companies will have some preferred product(s) and will mention it in a brief to agencies as an ideal requirement. Your recruitment agent will be adding these keywords to his search query.
Common sense
I’ve focused quite a lot on the concept of keyword-targeting in this article to get my point across, but don’t take that advice to the exclusion of all other factors. You need those focused keywords to help get your CV found by an agency but ultimately your CV must still read well because it is going to be sent to your potential new employer. A comma-delimited list of acronyms is just not going to cut it! A CV still needs to be a well structured document and read well, with succinct summaries of your recent work in reverse chronological order, ideally.
Self-correction
Keyword-targeting is SEO for your CV’s. In an ideal world, I would prefer that things didn’t work this way. “Don’t hate the player, hate the game” comes to mind. Again, this sort of thing probably applies more in IT-related fields and I’m placing my hopes on the self-correcting nature of an open market. By pointing this out, possibly more people will start to employ the strategy and force recruitment search algorithms to adapt and improve, so that one day the quality and content of a technical CV will count more than name dropping to get your foot in the door for an interview.