Understanding how your CV is processed

Sharing my experience as a recruitment consultant, hiring manager and employer

Disclaimer: this article doesn’t account for those employers who use software/AI to sort their applicants. My experience is in small to medium sized organisations where there are actual people at each stage of the process.

Having an understanding of how employers process and filter CVs will enable you to submit tailored applications efficiently and get through those ruthless first sifts. Of course this is my own personal experience, but having worked alongside many employers over the years, the process doesn’t change a great deal from organisation to organisation.

In a perfect world, every time a job is advertised, the person managing the recruitment process - whether in the company itself or a recruitment consultant - would take the time to read every application carefully, reading between the lines and translating your skillset to their role. But the reality is that for that person, this will likely be just one of many tasks in their workload and with some jobs attracting hundreds of applications, they need to use the time they can commit to it appropriately.

The recruitment process

There’s a well-worn saying that in the first sift of applications, the employer looks at your CV for an average of six - seven seconds but I can tell you now, when I had to make a shortlist out of 200+ applications, that’s how long I looked at the good ones. The bad ones could be dismissed in as little as a second. It sounds harsh and yes, I likely missed some crackers, but I had a job to do and a limited amount of time to do it in. In that first filter, I would be looking for the base criteria that I/my hiring manager/my client had identified as absolute dealbreakers (location, level of experience, qualification etc) alongside more instinctive indicators based on the right ‘fit’ for business and existing team. For example, if I was looking for a person to work in an office in Manchester, any CV with the location outside a reasonable perimeter would likely be discounted (this being said, if I was struggling for good applications and if it met all the other criteria and looked good, I might try to find in your CV/cover letter if you’re looking to relocate).

After this initial filtering, they’ll likely be left with no more than 5-10 applications to look through in more detail. From here, the fate of your application depends entirely on how good your CV is and how much time this person/people have to commit to the hiring process. I’ve been in situations where we’ve interviewed 10+ people over six months trying to find the right person and others where we’ve had one specific day - already in the diary - to conduct interviews and make a decision.

How you can make your CV stand out

I’m not going to go into the basics of things like spellchecking your CV, if you’re not doing that, you’re on your own kid… (I’m joking, we all make mistakes, but please.. it’s 2025.. we all know what that squiggly red line means now).

I want you to picture the process you go through when you look at job sites and what makes you read more on some ads while scrolling past others - this thing goes both ways, some employers really don’t help themselves with their job descriptions and advertising - you’ll more than likely be scanning the job description looking for where the job is, what it pays and if your skills match what they need. If it fits, you’ll look at the application process and if it’s hefty, you might do a further filter of if you really want to apply for this job.

In this process, both the applicant and the employer are looking at an advert from one another, trying to work out if it meets your criteria and if you are prepared to put in the time and effort to take it further.

The order of things matters

I’ve recorded a short commentary to explain the small changes you can make to your CV to make it really clear to a recruiter that you have what they need:

Jobhunting can be really bloody frustrating

What’s important to understand is that, even if you tick every box in the job description, there will be times when your application is rejected with a generic, ‘thanks but no thanks’ email. There are infinite reasons that this could happen and the majority of the time, you’re never going to find out. This is one of the hugely frustrating parts of the job hunting process but unfortunately, one you need to learn to live with. It’s no reflection on you as a person or on your career history and/or potential, you just weren’t the right fit this time. When this happens, there are some things you can do to keep the door open, especially if you liked the look of the employer:

• Always send a reply to their email and thank them for letting you know. Good comms works both ways, they’ve taken the time to let you know, take the time to acknowledge.

• Ask for feedback.

• Request that they keep your application on file for future opportunities.

• Be respectful of their decision.

That last one sounds condescending but let me tell you a quick story. A family member’s office was hiring an engineer and one of the interviewees was just pipped to the post by another person. He emailed and asked for feedback as he really wanted to work for the company and he was given an A4 page of constructive critique by one of the hiring managers. From here, he proceeded to argue over email and LinkedIn with the hiring manager about why he should reconsider his decision and hire him for the role. I know you can see where I’m going with this… All this made the hiring manager do was to breathe an enormous sigh of relief that they hadn’t hired this guy!