[LRUG] Expat thinking of coming home

[Louis Goff-Beardsley]

The vast majority of CVs they get don’t result in placments as their
business model is based on volume and speed. Agency recs have got very
strict KPIs such as 2.5 hours on the phone + 70 dial outs /day + x number of
CVs sent to decision makers. If they spend time faffing around with CVs they
will get it in the neck from their directors who came up during the first
dotcom bubble when IT recrutiment was a megaprofitable free-for-all.

-----Original Message-----
From: chat-bounces at lists.lrug.org [mailto:chat-bounces at lists.lrug.org] On
Behalf Of Paul Robinson
Sent: 17 September 2012 12:10
To: London Ruby Users Group
Subject: Re: [LRUG] Expat thinking of coming home

On 17 Sep 2012, at 10:11, Chris Mear <chrismear at gmail.com> wrote:

> From my conversations with recruiters, the reason Word format is asked for
is because it's editable (as opposed to something less easily editable, such
as PDF). This is so they can remove your contact details and add their own
header, thus making sure any communication goes through them.


This is bang-on the reason why they want it in Word format - which raises
the question what value are they actually adding to a process where they
must enforce a man-in-the-middle attack to negotiations?


> So I'm sure plain text would be fine.



Not quite. Some recruiters will consider such a format to be
"unprofessional" in its presentation to employers.

So, rather than add value themselves by spending 5 minutes copying/pasting
it into Word, making it look nice and then submitting it, they require the
candidate does this first. Word Doc is the best format for them.

They won't do it themselves, because they might handle many dozens of CVs a
day, and don't want to have to do this with all of them. 

Remember, they are commission-based, and there's only so much work they are
prepared to do to secure the right candidate and take 10%-20% of the first
year's salary on a £50k-£70k job. I mean, would you reformat a CV for
£14,000? I know that's too much work to ask me to do for that kind of money!
I'm sure there's other areas where the recruiter is really adding far more
value and where their time is best spent... </sarcasm>

Paul

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