How to make your Profile/CV stand out on job boards

How to make your Profile/CV stand out on job boards

If you’re looking for a new job, you are probably using sites like Reed, Job Site, CV Library to name a few; but are you really using it to your advantage or are you just popping your CV on there and hoping for the best? If it’s the latter, this short blog might be the most useful information you read all day!

Along with many other Recruiters and Employers, we use a good variety of job sites to search for candidates, and we’ve found ways to make these searches incredibly quick – us Recruiters are extremely busy bods! The only issue with narrowing our searches down is that sometimes that one fantastic candidate slips through the net… how, I hear you say? Well, in order for us to not spend ALL day sifting through Reed profiles, we narrow our search criteria down to exactly what we are looking for, let’s say for example ‘I want to find a Rocket Scientist who lives in Salisbury and wants a salary of £40,000’. 

  

There’s one candidate who is a fully fledged Rocket Scientist who has relocated from Scotland to live in Salisbury and is looking for exactly £40,000 – amazing! But no, this Rocket Scientist forgot to change his Reed profile to say that he now lives in Salisbury, so he’s not showing up in any Recruiter’s search, what a shame!

This can be the case with so many of the criteria on job sites and unless you regularly go onto your profile and update it with what you’re looking for, you’re not going to show up in the right searches – imagine the amount of jobs you could be missing out on. You might think job sites are only good for searching and applying for jobs, but there are so many vacancies that don’t even make it onto the job market before the Recruiter finds the perfect candidate for it and places the role!

One thing to be aware of with the salary bracket is that you may unintentionally rule yourself out of the perfect role just because it is paying £500 less than your ideal. It’s great that you have an ideal salary in mind and a good Recruiter will always do their best to negotiate you the best salary, however, bear in mind that your ideal salary may be different to your minimum salary requirement. When it asks you on Reed what salary you are looking for, I would advise putting in there the minimum that you’ll accept for the right position; you can always go into more detail once you speak to a Recruiter. If you were to put £40,000 in the salary field, you’ll only show up in searches that include that salary in their range, if you’ll accept £35,000 for the right role, put £35,000 and you’ll be sure to be included in more searches that might bring you your dream role.

Another way that your CV may be missed by Recruiters is when you leave key information blank – when I’m looking for a Pensions Administrator, I’m going to be drawn to the profiles who have Pensions, Financial Services, Administrator, all of those kind of buzz words in. One thing you may not know about Reed is that when searching through profiles, we only get a preview of a candidate in our list before having to click on them to see more. Now you may have remembered I mentioned Recruiters are the kind of people that wish for more hours at the end of every day, this means that when looking for candidates, we’re only going to look at the ones we feel match our criteria the most. When Reed asks for your current job title, I suggest you put your current job title in there, and keep this up to date… If I see a candidate who has ‘Looking for anything’ at ‘Anywhere’ in these fields, I’m not going to assume they’re currently working as an Administrator, and thus it would be a waste of time to click on their profile to find out.

If you want to guarantee that your profile, be it on Reed, LinkedIn, Job Site etc. is read by Recruiters, it’s so important to make sure your information on there is current and relevant! If you’re looking for a job right now, log onto your account and make sure your current job title is correct, make sure your salary requirements are realistic and correct and also make sure your telephone number is right – if I had a pound for every time I’ve tried to contact someone from the number on their CV to get through to someone who’s never heard of them, I’d be a little bit better off!

One last piece of information I’ll leave you with is ‘key words’ – a great way for Recruiters to search for candidates is by key words, this means if I’m searching for a Legal Secretary I’ll search for people who have the words ‘Legal’ AND ‘Secretary’ in their CV. If you want to make sure you are showing up in the right searches and getting noticed by Recruiters, you need to make sure you include key words that are relevant to your position and what you’re looking for, and I’d also suggest removing anything that is totally irrelevant from your CV. If you want help writing your CV, go to our candidates’ toolkit here and download our guide.

A common thing we hear from candidates is the amount of phone calls they receive from Recruiters about roles they’re not interested in – if you follow this simple advice, you’ll make it clear to Recruiters about what you’re interested in, and ensure you only show up on their radar if it’s going to be relevant to you.

So I hope this information may prove to be at least a little bit useful to you, even if it just means you head over to your Reed account and update your salary requirements. We hope this makes your job hunting a more effective process, and we wish you all the best in finding your perfect position. Please feel free to contact us if you need any advice!

 

About First2Recruit 

First2Recruit, are an owner managed recruitment consultancy providing a full recruitment service including; permanent and FTC positions in Accountancy Practice and Insolvency across the UK.  

Alternatively, visit www.first2recruit.co.uk or call one of their friendly team on 01722 440 168.