JOB NEWS from PERFECT CVs
	What Hiring Managers want to see in Job Applications

Since the volume of vacancies dropped towards the end of 2008 there has been numerous reports describing what "recruiters want". Surprisingly perhaps, they dont actually want anything they didnt want before. Quite simply, hiring managers and recruitment consultants are interested in finding out what value a candidate might make to an organisation. One of their main clues to this is the value that a candidate brought to their existing and previous employers; not just the tasks undertaken or the duties performed. They often already know the types of duties and tasks that are associated with specific job titles because these are relatively standard across organisations. In addition, most hiring personnel will have undertaken the type of job in question at some point in their careers or they have managed people doing that job for many years. Recruitment consultants will have recruited to similar positions on numerous occasions and will be familiar with the main duties of each job. Hence, listing duties and responsibilities on a CV is a complete waste of time.

The recruiter is far more interested in what a candidate actually achieved and how the achievement came about. What decisions did the candidate make that led to the achievements. What level of accountability existed. How were resources deployed. By exploring these issues a picture emerges of what contribution or value a candidate brought to the employer.

Recruiters may then ask questions such as "what was the core purpose of a job, project or task?", "what was the job supposed to contribute to the running of the organisation?", "why does the role exist at all?" This level of information helps potential employers and recruitment consultants understand, in a nutshell, what a candidate was being asked to achieve and allows them to understand the level at which the candidate was operating. This in turn helps determine whether the candidate is capable of operating at the level of the position in question. Ensuring that this information is included in a CV goes a long way to differentiate applicants simply because most applicants dont include the detail and it also helps to convince a recruiter that the applicant understands the value people bring to an organisation via their activity.

Achievements have three elements: What was done, how it was done and what was the result or impact of what was done.
Achievements are things a candidate did which added value, made a tangible difference and contributed to the business of the organisation. They are not skills learned, abilities developed, knowledge gained or awards won.
A statement in a CV (which is common!) such as: "Reviewed and restructured the company's sales force", does not provide much useful information to the reader. The typical response to such a statement of achievement would be a blunt: “so what?”. Recruiters want to know how it was done and what the impact was. Reviewing is not an achievement in itself; it is a task or process. "Re-structured" is far too vague a statement to be of much use to the reader and anyway often gets interpreted as a polite way of saying "downsized".
The achievement might be word-smithed as: "Increased profit by 10% by de-centralising the sales force and delegating decision making authority to trained Regional Managers resulting in 25% more orders being closed in the field."
If achievements can be quantified, it is great to quote the numbers involved but the number itself is meaningless without context. Increasing sales by £2m, improving profit by 10%, improving customer satisfaction ratings to 90% may all be the result of natural market trends unless it is explained why the numbers represent achievement.


Quite often an achievement in any of the key indicators of an organisation are brought about by a number of factors and by a number of employees. Recruiters know this and expect an applicant's role in an achievement to be stated and phrases such as “participated in” or were “involved” in just frustrates as it gives no clue as to what value the applicants's actions were. An employer will rightly ask the question: "What was the role? What was the level of participation?" Hence weak and vague terms and phrases need to be avoided and achievements made as explicit as possible without delving into minute details.

With the exception of new graduates and school leavers, it is not generally useful to provide information in a CV about awards or rewards received or information about skills learned and developed in a job. These are typically not the types of achievements in which an employer or recruitment consultant is
interested. They want to know how the awards or rewards were earned or what actions were taken as a result of what was learned, how were new skills utilised to the organisation's benefit.

So what recruiters want is clear. Straightforward statements of what value a candidate brought to previous employers.