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Tailoring Your CV for Different Markets - How to get Recruiters to find you

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Candidates often ask me how to write the perfect CV. There is no perfect CV that will do all the jobs you need it to do. The reality is that finding a job is a fulltime job in itself - otherwise recruiters would not exist. You need a tailored CV for each job you apply for. You will probably need another general CV for recruiters and possibly the same one or another one if you are going to put your CV on a CV database. This week, I am going to talk about CV databases and how to get recruiters to find you. 

In the last ten years, recruitment and the job recruiters do has changed beyond recognition. At one time, you , as a candidate, would have registered with a few agencies and built up a relationship with the recruiters within them particularly if you found one who understood you and what you were looking for. Now candidates put their CV's on CV databases and recruiters pay to go on those databases and find you. They will contact you if they have relevant jobs and you can end up being contacted by quite a few agencies which you've never heard of and which may not even be in the local area. So how do you get us to find you?

We search under salary and area but most importantly, we search under keywords and if those words aren't on your CV, you won't come up in our search. So for example, if an employer tells us they want a Management Accountant with experience of a SAP system we will search for "Management Accountant" and "SAP". This type of search is called a Boolean Search and we use it all the time. If you were a Management Accountant looking for a job you would come up in this search but what if your title was Finance Business Partner and you had used SAP but just put that you had used ERP systems on your CV. You wouldn't necessarily be found unless the recruiter decided to do another search. It is therefore very important to have as many keywords on your CV for the kind of role you want. 

I would recommend a paragraph at the top of your CV for CV database purposes with a long list of words that recruiters might use to look for people like you. For example a management accountant might spell out the systems they have used, state whether they have used Pivot tables, V-Lookups etc, state what industries they have worked in or want to work in and add in words like "budgets" "analysis" and "management accounts". 

Doing this should increase your chances of finding that perfect job! Next time I shall look at tailoring your CV for your dream job so keep reading!!

Jeanette