What Recruiters Actually Look for When They Read Your CV

People massively overcomplicate what recruiters are doing when they read a CV.

We’re not checking whether you’ve used the perfect font.

We’re not sitting there with a secret list of banned words.

We’re not awarding points because you managed to squeeze “results-driven professional” into your opening paragraph.

And despite what half the internet seems to think, we’re not watching an ATS produce a magical employability score out of 100.

We’re trying to answer a much simpler question.

Is there enough here for me to want to speak to this person?

I’ve spent more than 20 years working in recruitment and reviewed thousands of CVs. Exactly what matters changes from job to job, but the basic thought process is remarkably consistent.

First: what do you actually do?

A Marketing Manager in a five-person company could be doing everything from strategy to writing Instagram captions.

A Marketing Manager in a multinational might manage a £20 million budget and a team of 30.

Same title. Completely different job.

So I’m looking for context.

What sort of company do you work for? What’s your remit? What do you own? What level are you operating at? Who do you work with? What sort of scale are we talking about?

I need to understand the shape of your experience.

Second: have you done the things this job needs?

This is where relevance matters.

If I’m recruiting someone to lead a team of 40 people across five countries, your experience managing two people in one office isn’t irrelevant, but it isn’t the same thing.

If the job needs someone who has implemented Salesforce and you’ve done three Salesforce implementations, I’d quite like to know that.

This isn’t about copying every phrase from the job description into your CV.

It’s about understanding that recruitment is a matching exercise.

You have a collection of experience.

The employer has a collection of problems and requirements.

Your CV needs to make the overlap clear.

Third: how good are you?

This is the part loads of CVs barely answer.

They tell me what somebody did.

They don’t tell me how well they did it.

Imagine you’re hiring a chef and every CV says:

“Responsible for preparing food.”

“Maintained kitchen standards.”

“Worked as part of a team.”

“Ensured excellent customer service.”

Technically useful information.

But you still don’t know who can actually cook.

CVs do this constantly.

Responsibilities give me context, but evidence of impact gives me reasons to be interested.

What did you achieve? What changed? What were you trusted with? What scale did you operate at? What problems did you solve?

That’s where the person behind the job description starts to appear.

Fourth: does the career make sense?

I’m also looking at the journey.

Have you progressed?

Have you moved around a lot?

Have you completely changed direction?

Is there a gap?

Did you go from Director to Manager?

None of these things are automatically bad.

I’ve seen people become obsessed with hiding career gaps or worrying that one short job is destroying their prospects. Usually I’m simply trying to understand what happened.

Context solves a lot.

The bigger issue is when the CV creates questions and gives me absolutely nothing to answer them.

Fifth: is anything making the decision harder than it needs to be?

Bad formatting matters when it gets in the way.

A seven-page wall of text is difficult to read.

Tiny fonts are difficult to read.

Huge paragraphs containing five different ideas are difficult to read.

Over-designed CVs where I’m trying to work out whether the work history continues in the left column or the right column are difficult to read.

But notice the theme.

The problem isn’t that a recruiter has a personal vendetta against a particular font.

The problem is friction.

I want to find useful information quickly. Help me.

How long does a recruiter spend reading a CV?

People love quoting an exact number here.

Six seconds. Seven seconds. 7.4 seconds. I’ve seen all sorts.

I don’t think it’s particularly useful.

I’ve rejected CVs faster than that because the mismatch was immediately obvious. I’ve spent several minutes on others because the person looked interesting and I wanted to understand their experience properly.

The point isn’t to optimise your CV for some mythical stopwatch.

The point is that your CV needs to work at different depths.

I should be able to skim it and understand roughly who you are.

Then, if I’m interested, I should be able to read deeper and find the evidence that backs it up.

What happens if the CV works?

Usually, I speak to you.

And that changes the assessment.

The CV has created enough interest, but now I want to understand what’s behind it. Your experience gets more context, practical questions get answered and I start deciding whether I’m comfortable introducing you to the hiring manager.

I’ve written a full article about what’s really happening during that first 20-minute recruiter call because candidates often treat it as an informal chat when there’s actually a fairly important decision being made.

But first you’ve got to get the call.

Make the decision easy

That’s probably the best CV advice I can give you.

Don’t make me guess why you’re relevant.

Don’t make me translate your internal terminology.

Don’t make me dig through 20 years of history to find the experience that matters.

Don’t tell me only what your job description said you were supposed to do.

Give me enough context to understand you, enough relevance to see the match and enough evidence to want to know more.

That’s what I’m looking for.

If you want to know how well your current CV does those things, upload it to my Free CV Score.

Score your CV free and see what a recruiter might notice first