The Search Isn’t Over – After Keywords

I was reading a friends post on LinkedIn about his gripes on recruitment (Andrew Jacobs – What Grinds My Gears, Recruitment) and it made me think of a pet hate of mine.

We all know that Recruitment Agencies receive and have a store of hundreds (if not more) CVs.

We know that the only way for them to find relevant skills is to use the keyword search on their system.

And I have no problem with any of that.

BUT

How often to you receive an email like this:

And all that was on my CV was FireFox.

OK, so that’s one that I made up, don’t want to embarrass anyone, but it does prove my point.

As a recruiter, you want to find those gems, filtering out the CVs that don’t match the requirements, but after the search you need to spend the time on your top 10 (?) results and go into them, actually read the CV.

Please, please review it, and ask yourself these types of questions:

• where are the keywords?
• when were those roles?
• what are they doing now/recently?
• is my role something that they will be interested in?

Think more quality over quantity.

Note: There are some great recruiters out there who do their homework and send great roles out.

What are some of your experiences like this?
Share them in the comments.