From a good friend…

“I applied for what I thought was the perfect job for me only to be told by the recruitment agency that they use a machine to filter cvs and mine was rejected because it didn’t have the correct words in it. The machine then sent me an automatic rejection letter! Can you believe it? Humans don’t even read cvs anymore and machines are being used to judge character.”

So, what are the necessary key-words that your little recruitment machines like to see?? Let’s say for a marketing job (apart from Saab, Black turtle-neck, iThing and fixie)

I can sell fridge to the Eskimos.

idave – CVs are all uploaded to a database and the only way to search them is using words in the CV. The thick recruiters simply count the “correct” words. Crude but true.

Better recruiters (hopefully I was one) will read CVs properly and use networking, etc to find good people. Most recruiters are the lowest life forms on earth. Apart from bankers and personal injury lawyers.

My company uses an automatic filter for redeployments and internal vacancies, I got a list of keywords and it’s exactly the buzzword bingo you’d expect- facilitated, motivated, actioned, crap like that. So since I’m trying to get made redundant I intentionally avoided them all

Surf-mat obviously lives by the barter system and has no use for banks 😆

Doesn’t Hora work in recruitment?

Hi ho, hi ho, a lynching we shall go…

very common for graduate jobs, many base the first round of rejections on a combination of degree, a level and gcse results.

I know certain companies filter you out if you have less than 2:1 or no GCSE in English and maths above a C.

You’ve got to realise just how many CV’s get received.

A client of mine is an (short-term contract) agency, and they mark-up the CV’s by hand and then upload into the database.

But the recruiters only ever look at either who is coming off-contract, has been on contract recently or one that the Directors have ‘tagged’…

Many just use scanner with OCR to upload CVs.

NW – okay then, merchant bankers.

It in my opinion is a terribly unregulated industry. Also you’ll often find (on Linkedin) that the recruiter used to work, or has a qualification in the industry (in my case design) and I can only presume got the same treatment they give out. So decided to make others lives miserable.

Is it cyberdyne systems in early operation?

So a crappy agency did something bad and all recruiters smell of poo.

I will kill myself immediately.

It is a terrible industry, I worked as a Rec Consultant for a year for one of the biggest companies. I have never previously defended them, I hated every minute of my time there, but, I have not seen any software used to filter CV’s.

I only made money by filling jobs, I only filled jobs by selling my candidates, I could only sell them if I knew them and their CV’s back to front.

Hated it so much. The best consultants were the biggest w*nkers.