What does a recruiter see when they open your CV?
When we send a CV, it is natural to think about everything we want to include: our experience, our education, the projects we have been involved in, the tools we are familiar with or the positions we have held throughout our career.
But when a recruiter opens a CV, the first question is not usually how much you have done throughout your career. The question is much simpler: can I quickly understand who this professional is and what they can bring to the role?
A good CV does not necessarily have to be the longest, the most creative or the one containing the most information. It needs to achieve something much more important: to make your professional career easy to understand.
First of all: knowing where you fit
One of the first things a recruiter needs to identify is what type of professional they are looking at. And the way we present our experience can make an important difference here.
Saying that you have “experience in industry” may be true, but it provides very little context. By contrast, saying that you are an “industrial engineer specialising in production and process improvement” allows your profile to be understood much more quickly.
This is not about reducing an entire professional career to a single sentence. It is about making it easy to identify, when your CV is opened, what you do, what your area of expertise is and where your professional experience lies.
This is particularly important when we are talking about professionals with several years of experience or career paths that have evolved over time. If you have moved through different positions, sectors or areas of responsibility, your CV should help the reader understand the common thread running through your career.
Experience needs context
Another aspect that can provide valuable information in a CV is the context surrounding the responsibilities you have taken on.
“Team management” tells us about a responsibility, but it does not allow us to understand its actual scope. Managing a team of three people is not the same as leading a department of 25 professionals. Nor is taking part in a project the same as being responsible for its planning, execution and results.
That is why some seemingly simple details can help us understand your experience much better:
- The size of the team managed.
- The type and scale of the projects.
- The scope of responsibility.
- The tools or technologies used.
- The results or improvements achieved.
You do not need to turn every role into a report or fill your CV with figures. But it is worth asking yourself whether what you have written makes it possible to understand the level of responsibility that actually sat behind each position.
Not every part of your career carries the same weight
A professional career can include many years of experience and different types of responsibilities. However, not all of this information will necessarily be equally relevant to every opportunity.
If you are applying for a maintenance position, your experience in industrial maintenance, equipment, facilities or fault management is likely to be particularly relevant. If you are looking for a production position, your experience in plant management, teams, processes or continuous improvement may be more relevant.
The same applies to other areas. For a commercial position, certain clients, targets or commercial responsibilities will carry more weight. For a technology position, it will probably be important to identify the technologies, projects and technical knowledge related to the role as quickly as possible.
Your CV does not need to hide the rest of your career, but it should give visibility to what is relevant to the position.
The experience that can best help demonstrate your suitability should not get lost among secondary information.
Adapting your CV does not mean filling it with keywords
When we talk about adapting a CV to a job vacancy, it is common to think immediately about keywords. And using the appropriate professional terminology can help to quickly identify certain skills or areas of experience.
But adapting a CV should not become a matter of adding words simply because they appear repeatedly in a job description.
What matters is using the professional language of your sector and your experience in a natural way. If you have worked with a particular technology, methodology, tool or process, it makes sense to mention it. If you have managed specific projects or taken on particular responsibilities, those should be included too.
The key is for the information to help the reader understand your profile, rather than simply accumulating terms that make the document more difficult to read.
What should a recruiter be able to identify quickly?
When someone opens your CV, they should be able to form a fairly clear idea of your profile without having to reconstruct your entire professional career.
Among other things, they should be able to identify:
- What your professional specialism is.
- Which sectors or areas you have experience in.
- What level of responsibility you have taken on.
- What type of projects or responsibilities you have undertaken.
- Which parts of your experience are most relevant to the position.
The easier this information is to find, the easier it will be to understand your career.
And this does not mean that your CV needs to become a rigid document designed solely to pass through a screening system. Quite the opposite. A good CV should be designed so that a person can read it and understand it quickly.
Try this before sending your application
Before sending your CV, you can try something very simple: read it as if you did not know your own career.
Imagine that you are the recruiter and have just opened the document for the first time. After a few seconds, try to answer these questions:
- Do I know what type of professional I am looking at?
- Do I understand their area of specialisation?
- Can I get a sense of their level of responsibility?
- Can I quickly identify the experience relevant to the position?
If you need to read practically the entire document to answer these questions, perhaps you do not need to add more information. You may simply need to organise and highlight the information you already have more effectively.
A good CV does not tell everything you have done
Your professional career may include years of experience, numerous projects, different positions and many responsibilities. Trying to include absolutely everything can mean that the most important information loses visibility.
A CV does not need to function as a complete record of your professional life. It needs to function as a tool that makes it possible to understand your career and your professional fit.
That is why, before adding another line to your CV, perhaps the question should not be “what else can I add?”. Perhaps it should be: “does what is already there really show what I can do?”
Because a good CV makes it easy to understand what you can do
A recruiter does not need your CV to be perfect. They need to be able to understand it.
To understand who you are professionally, where your experience lies, what responsibilities you have taken on and what you can bring to a particular position.
A good CV does not tell everything you have done. It makes it easy to understand what you can do.
And that difference can completely change the way a professional career is perceived.
At onhunters, we specialise in talent search and selection, with a focus on technical profiles, middle management and executive positions.
If you are looking for a new professional opportunity or would like to find out how we can help you attract talent, let’s talk.
