I feel very lucky that I have had quite a lot of experience in recruitment, mainly at Lord’s Cricket Ground where I was for four years before opening Kaffeine, managing the staffing of the Catering department. I would have to assess 1000”s of CV’s every year in the application process to ascertain if the applicant was good enough to be invited to a group interview for the 600 or so staff we needed for every game.
I am also lucky that I am a fairly fast reader, and can skim through things and pick out the important parts, the highlights, the main points, the things that grab my attention, so when reading an application for work, I guess I can find the good or bad points pretty quickly. Obviously operating Kaffeine we see a lot of CV’s come across our emails, and now our manager Claire looks after this process very well indeed.
I also had to look for work when we first arrived on the UK in 2005, and had some very good and valuable feedback about how to write a CV from a professional recruiter. (I got rejected a lot, including by Cafe Nero to be their company trainer).
So I have been thinking about this and I may get into trouble for this analogy, but it is the only one I can think of to make this point and it goes both ways. For the applicant and the recruiter.
Recruitment is like fishing.
If you are the applicant, you are looking for the best possible employer to provide you with security, money, training, fun, reputation, leadership, opportunity, organisation etc etc. You go fishing for an employer.
If you are the recruiter you are looking for an employee who can provide you with skills, knowledge, passion, enthusiasm, honesty, work ethic, organisation, commitment etc etc. You go fishing for an employee.