Four Steps a Recruiter Takes to Trash CVs and Resumes

Having 200-300 CVs or resumes to analyse, a tight schedule, and probably working late, an employer's or recruiting manager's approach is to scan the huge pile quickly and look for any little reason to trash your CV or resume. Learn how to avoid your CV or resume being trashed and how to almost guarantee that it gets noticed and shortlisted.

So what happens when the pile of 300 CVs and resumes are put in front of the recruitment manager? Well there are three main steps, which are taken to filter the pile. Filtering is needed to choose appropriate candidates for the interview stage. So those not worthy of being interviewed have their CVs or resumes trashed. Let's take a look at them one by one.

The first stage: The 5-10 second glance

The recruitment manager is not going to spend minutes going through each CV or resume to find what he is looking for. Rather, his first step is to spend at the most 10 seconds to take a quick glance at mainly the first page and the following page(s) if the first page interests him. So the process of elimination begins with the following:

* Any CV or resume which is longer than 4 pages will be trashed.
* Any CV or resume that does not have a profile, or objective or similar paragraph and an easy discernible list of skills on the front page will get trashed.
* Any CV or resume which is written in long sentences and lengthy paragraphs and where a quick glance does not allow the identification of relevant information, such as skills and achievements will get trashed.
* Any CV or resume which is annoying. This is mainly due to bad formatting.

By now the recruitment manager has gladly trashed 70% of all the pile and is left with around 80-90 CVs or resumes. Happy with the time he has saved, he or she can now spend a little more quality time scanning what remains...

This release was published on openPR.