On Tuesday 28th April at 1pm BST, Simon Ward and I will be joined on our weekly LinkedIn Live by CV Library. I'll share the details of this free interactive session as soon as the event link is available - bring your questions. If you don't know CV Library it's one of the main job boards in the UK. While they might sit behind others in terms of coverage, I find them easy to work with and helpful - they are responsive, they have fewer fake jobs than LinkedIn, they have a CV database I can search across that is in many ways more effective than #OpenToWork. They'll be showing how to get a better mileage from their CV database, as a job seeker, and many other helpful things - points you can apply to LinkedIn too, as an inbound sources of recruiter searches and the principles we use to look for viable candidates. It seems timely to share this updated chapter from A Career Breakdown Kit (2026) , which I will no doubt update with learnings from the session. 38 - Better use of job boards Job boards are often the first port of call when new to a job search. It’s a natural inclination that they are where vacancies are to be found. Quickly followed by disappointment, anxiety and frustration when you get close to 0% hit rate. And not even a single reply. Let’s take a step back, look at the overall picture and make a plan. There are many job boards in the UK that sell their systems to employers and recruitment agencies. You may be familiar with Indeed, Reed, CV Library, Jobsite / Totaljobs, LinkedIn (yes, it is a job board, disguised by being a social media platform). Aside from the generic, there are also many sites specific to your niche. As well as ATS platforms themselves. Job boards sell two things to their clients - advertising and access to their CV database. Although LinkedIn differs in how it is wrapped up with content and networking, it does have a form of CV database in how we can use the Recruiter Licence to search profiles (we can even make do without through more advanced techniques such as X-ray searching and programmable search engines). There are also aggregator websites which scrape content from one job board to their own or a third party. You can often tell because when you click apply it takes you to another website instead of properly starting an application. Job board priorities and what that means for you Job boards want to sell their services and make money, which is entirely sensible. To support their argument they use all sorts of metrics such as the number of CVs on their database and the number of applications made (by job or month). It’s to their advantage that adverts receive as many applications as possible - their advice on improving advert performance is geared around volume. Rather than around suitable candidates. This disconnect happens because clients often lie about how effective adverts have been by the measure of vacancies filled - because of concern it will affect renewal prices. This is feedback given to me from account managers at two different job boards when researching job search advice. Job boards can only prove the number of applications, so that becomes the target. The most effective job adverts have fewer applications and a higher number of suitable candidates - what I aim for in mine. To maximise the number of applications they do things like scraping, aggregation and affiliate arrangements. They offer services like automatic relisting where an advert is reposted as new once a week throughout the term of the listing (could be up to 6 weeks by default, or longer by choice). These are sold as benefits to employers which might help when there are limited candidates, yet often hinder when there are too many candidates for jobs. You may remember the same from Fake jobs (p81). They make it as Easy as possible for you to Apply for these jobs, so that you can be an additional metric. As Goodhart says, ‘When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.’ The consequence for you as an applicant is twofold. You are encouraged to be one of the numbers of applicants to purposefully generic adverts you are not the most suitable for. When you are the most suitable, you are in competition both with people from the line above and people who are wholly unsuitable. I should point out I don’t think job boards do this cynically. They do so because they think high numbers are best. It’s also a problem for recruiters who may find it impossible to deal with this volume unless through automation or by finding ways to manually eliminate applications at scale. Job boards, employers, agencies and candidates are all wrapped up in this cycle of speed and volume. And with use of AI-style automation, so too are many job seekers. Where's the specificity and accuracy? Though it might be the best way to make money. Job seekers are accountable too, partly because of how they have been trained to apply. Don’t blame recruiters. Don’t blame employers. Don’t blame unqualified applicants. Blame the system we are all part of. And if you ever find yourself a hiring authority - be the change you hope for. Better use of job boards Let’s go back to that point about applications. In the current market, it’s not uncommon to see hundreds to thousands of applications per vacancy. Rarely are those applications qualified candidates. For a typical job description templated advert you can expect the high majority of applicants to be wholly unsuitable. What do I mean by wholly unsuitable? People who require work permits when a role doesn’t sponsor them. People who don’t meet the minimum requirements set out in an advert. People who are clearly unsuitable for this role. When you see a number, don’t be disheartened by the number alone. As a job seeker, your minimum requirement to apply for a vacancy should be that you can logically prove to yourself you are qualified based on the evidence provided. Read back through Should I customise my CV? (p178) for more on this. … tips and bits Finding vacancies is as important as applying for them. Collect those synonyms you’ve been tailoring your CV with and use these in your searches. If you find an obscure term which represents what you can do, why not search solely on that term? You might find a horribly written advert whose only correct word is that term. It’s a trick we use to find candidates too - occasionally I might search on something like ‘egnieer’ because typos don’t make a bad candidate. Location is a key search criterion. Most people search from their home address. How about running tight searches where you are prepared to work - e.g. 1 mile from CB4 0WZ (a hub for business parks in Cambridge where I worked many moons ago). How to optimise for CV databases When you apply for a vacancy on a new job board they will likely have a CV database tethered to your application. Your permission to have your CV added may be hidden in their terms and conditions. A CV database is an opportunity for you to be found. Sometimes this will be for vacancies that are never advertised, such as the example I wrote about earlier. You have an opportunity to leverage CV databases to improve the number of inbound enquiries you receive. Log all the job boards you’ve applied through Make a list of all that have CV databases, including login details Ensure your CV is up to date containing the keywords for the job you are most suitable for Check your contact details are correct Check all the details on your account. Salary details, location, preferences should all be current. Register your postcode for where you want to be found. If you plan to move to Scunthorpe in April, that should be your current location. It’s where we will look for you Update your CV and profiles once a week. It shouldn’t take long. If you are active in the past week, this will show up in recruiter searches, assuming a recruiter only looks at activity from the past 14 days The CV databases at the back end of job boards are one of the resources I use to fill roles whether advertised or not. They’re a good marginal gain and may bring you leads you’d never hear about otherwise. A note on the ATS Whenever you come across an advert linked to an ATS like Workable, many companies will use that ATS. These may recruit for relevant vacancies in a commutable location. Try this command in Google - site: workable.com London “Marketing Manager” Site: directs the search to a particular website. Change the location and job title to ones relevant for you. Some of these vacancies may never make it to a job board you are aware of. Why you should hack LinkedIn advert results URLs (website page addresses) are a funny thing - they often contain commands for a website related to your requests. Changing certain points can have interesting results. For example, here’s a URL for a job search for Marketing Manager near me over the past 24 hours: https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/search-results/?f_TPR=r86400&keywords=Marketing%20Manager&origin=JOBS_HOME_SEARCH_BUTTON Don’t worry about the bulk of the URL. Take note of the bold - r86400 which matches seconds in a day. Let’s say you log on at 9.30am and you want to check jobs posted in the last hour. This feature isn’t available as standard in the search tools. However, you can edit the URL from a standard search to: https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/search-results/?f_TPR=r3600&keywords=Marketing%20Manager&origin=JOBS_HOME_SEARCH_BUTTON Because there are 3,600 seconds in an hour. Try it and see what happens. (Edit: in error checking for this article, originally updated in January, this particular ‘hack’ no longer appears to work. Why not try it yourself on a job you’re interested in and let me know if it works for you? I’ll update this properly for the next book update. I've left it here to show how this kind of tactical advice can change so quickly as to make it obsolete. Next week's article is on Content Strategy & Philosophy for promoting yourself on LinkedIn. Call it personal branding, call it copywriting - expect some people to jump on with strong opinions without reading the article) 

(With luck she won't sue me for copyright infringement) I was reminded about the imperative to lie at times, when commenting on a post about namism this week. Namism is discrimination against uncommon names, with proof that a change of name improves the likelihood of getting an interview from an application. A lie that mitigates the worst behaviour in a recruitment process seems reasonable behaviour to me. What follows is an article released around the same time as my sister's book, as a tribute to her fine work. At the time I planned to call it "Nothing but the truth" the name she refused to use, because her publisher told her negative titles don't sell - he clearly hasn't seen a Bond film. Instead, I went for a House quote, "Everybody lies", because like it or not, everybody does. June 2023 At the end of her speech, my sister made a simple request: “Put your hand in the air if you’ve lied today.” Only one person didn’t put their hand up – me. Lying’s not in my nature, except in a couple of specific situations where no harm is caused. You can believe that or not, up to you. The earlier part of the speech touched on all those little moments in our lives where we tell a little lie, either to ourselves or someone else. Sometimes it’s to protect feelings. Sometimes to protect ourselves. Sometimes it’s to keep up the narrative of how we are perceived because we don’t want to share our secret selves. It was a great launch for a book on how society doesn’t just put up with lies to function, it may even rely on them. She interviewed a wide range of experts on lying including spies and toddler scientists, showed how the face can lie, and talked about her amnesia and what it was like to be in the closet. She didn’t interview me about recruitment, so I’m putting that right today. Lies are rampant everywhere you look in recruitment. In a survey last year, 51% of respondents admitted to lying on their CVs. I expect the true number to be higher, considering some won’t even admit a lie to themselves. It’s common to extrapolate behaviour from what we experience. One lie may lead to more, and that may be the only reason you need to reject a candidate. Not all lies are born equal. Broadly I differentiate them between lies of impact, lies to protect, and lies of inconsequence. A lie of impact is one which leads to a decision based on that lie. Here an example would be John Andrewes , who lied about his experience and qualifications to land a top NHS job. He was jailed for 2 years and required to pay £100k, the remainder of his assets. Fraud. Or lying about reasons for departure – they say redundancy, they meant gross misconduct. Misrepresenting capability and qualifications. Mispresenting a role to make it more appealing. £Competitive salary, when you meant lowball to get a deal. The lies we should find and cull at the earliest opportunity. A lie to protect can be many things. I remember an HR candidate early in my career who changed her name twice. It was highly suspicious to me at the time. “Apunanwu Oluwayo” became “Apunanwu Roberts” became “Judith Roberts”. This first change suggested a marriage or divorce. The second I couldn’t fathom. What a liar, 2005 Greg thought. Of course, now I know better. It’s likely she changed her name to a British one because she suffered from namism – one report indicates candidates are 60% less likely to receive a call-back with a foreign-sounding name. Despite my ignorance, I gave Judith the benefit of the doubt and invited her to interview. You can see why blind CVs are a fair measure to prevent this happen, although I wonder if it’s better to treat the illness rather than rely on palliative measures. How about not disclosing identifiable education for the same reasons? What about disability and neurodivergence? If a condition requires an accommodation to fulfil a role, is non-disclosure a lie by omission? Another could be lying about reasons for departure – they said ‘left to focus on a job search’, they meant they couldn’t put up with a harmful environment any longer. A lie of protection, which isn’t one of impact, should be clarified but, in my opinion, not penalised without investigation. The lie above is one of protection – I changed the names to protect the individual, one of the situations in which I will lie deliberately, with good reason. How about a lie of inconsequence? By this I mean a lie that doesn’t impact employability, reflect capability or have any bearing on what that person is like to work with. Examples here might be fudging employment dates to prevent the question “Why were you unemployed for 2 days in 2012?” Or perhaps they might say People Business Partner on their CV, which they fulfilled functionally, yet had a misrepresentative job title of Operations Manager. Sometimes what seem to be lies of impact, might be lies of inconsequence: I once had a candidate withdraw from an interview. Aladdin said his father had passed away, and he had decided to suspend his job search. I spoke to the hiring manager, Jaffar, and said “This smacks of lying” principally because of a change in behaviour that didn’t seem related to grief, and the very high mortality rate candidates sometimes experience throughout recruitment. It was a tough vacancy to fill, so we made a plan. Jaffar would contact him directly a couple of weeks after, to check in and see if he fancied a pint. We put our suspicion aside, while also considering how he might have perceived his relationship with me. Long story short Aladdin took the job and was there for eight years. He gave me a lovely recommendation too. I’m pleased to say his father made a full recovery. While this appears to be a lie of impact, it’s actually one of inconsequence. He lied because he didn’t feel safe telling me he was having second thoughts. That’s on me, because it is my job to create a safe space for candidates so that they trust me and tell me inconvenient truths. It’s not dissimilar to the hilariously high rate of car breakdowns in recruitment. Have we considered our part in that lie? These three types of lies are a gross simplification to paint the picture. Our perception of lying is highly subjective, and there is no one right answer. I think it’s understandable to feel a lie is a dealbreaker. For lies of impact, this should be the case. For other lies though, perhaps a judgment call is better than an assumption. Why did that person lie? Could it even be something we did? Does that lie really matter? And if it does matter – how many times have you lied in the same way today? The next eminently-an-epistole is on technical debt in recruitment, and why we should consider the long-term impact of a short-term compromise.  Regards, Greg P.s. if you’re interested in Kathleen’s book, you can read about it here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Social-Superpower-Truth-About-Little-ebook/dp/B09MDWNL44

What follows is Chapter 37 of A Career Breakdown Kit (2026) . I expect you've read and heard many arguments about how important is to have a discoverable LinkedIn profile - one where recruiters can find you for their vacancies, including the ones that aren't advertised. Indeed, when you hit the market, your LinkedIn profile is one of the first activities you should try and get right - because your job search can optimise for inbound leads before you think about anything else. Yet a lot of the focus is on getting found, and there's a consequence to this that I think is worse than not getting found at all: the recruiter who reads your profile for an ideal vacancy and decides not to contact you. And because Recruiter Licence accesses your data in a different way to the platform you use, you'll never know. So this Chapter is the direct follow up to LinkedIn Profiles that Get Found , one which aims to convert an invisible reader to someone that contacts you for legitimate reasons. I'm going to be updating that chapter soon, with some additional findings, such as why your headline doesn't carry quite as much weight as you might think. I should point out, as a recruiter I am quite happy for you to have a weak profile, given it means I am more likely to find you through rigour, if others rely on well specified information. For example tomorrow I will be setting up an interview for someone who has 1 LinkedIn connection and only a job title and company name - nothing else. He came up for me because his job title matched my search, and I used an industry term in the "Company Name" section - an approach that is common for employers in that niche industry. But as I always say - it's better to help the weakest link in the chain see you as a viable candidate because same work helps everyone. 37 - LinkedIn profiles that convert An Amazon (job) search When I buy a commodity item on Amazon there are two stages to my buying process. I know what I want and I have to find an acceptable shortlist of possibilities. Only then do I assess and decide on what to buy. As a sweaty runner that clocks up 50-60km a week, I burn through Bluetooth headphones regularly. I’m also deaf in one ear and can’t tell the difference in higher quality sound. My context is a little different to the normal buyer although likely no more different than most buyers are from each other. A search on ‘Bluetooth headphones’ brings up over 2,000 results, which is hardly manageable. I change the search to ‘waterproof Bluetooth headphones’, and filter by: £15-£30, in ear, Prime, running. 125 results. Much better. Now I scan down the list and I ignore Sponsored. I’m not sure why. Click on the first one with a relevant headline promising 50hrs playtime and skim past all the marketing twaddle. Who cares what they say - what do their buyers think? I go straight to the three-star reviews because they are generally good with caveats. One of the three-star reviews says they were offered a discount to change it to five. That’s BS that turns me right off. I click through a few more products and buy one. The decent guarantee swung it for me. I didn’t get past the first 40 results. Now think about your own commodity purchases, where you have to do differing levels of research to get what you need. What kind of search criteria do you use? How do you filter? What informs your decision to buy? Perhaps you already know what you want to buy, having researched buyer guides, YouTube videos and user forums, and are just sourcing the best price. Or maybe you need something adequate, and literally anything above an acceptable threshold will do - 5 minutes and done. These are examples of a buyer’s journey across a transactional process. Which isn’t far removed from how recruiters might search for candidates. On LinkedIn and other channels. Bringing it back to your job search LinkedIn and Amazon - what’s the difference? In a hiring process, they are both volume, transactional marketplaces that allow searches and filters to create an appropriate shortlist to read through. As with a product on Amazon, your LinkedIn profile is one of many that fit similar criteria and might be found at any stage in a recruitment process. From a search through the Recruiter Licence A hiring manager reading more on a shortlisted candidate Their boss researching you at final interview Out of curiosity from a comment or post you wrote Checking it out on receipt of an application Because you were recommended Because you worked at a certain company In the same way customers might visit a product page on Amazon, so too might someone hiring visit your profile. This means that it doesn’t have to just stand on its own merits, it has to corroborate and support any other documentation a reader might have come across: Your CV or application Your LinkedIn posts and comments Something you did that’s in the public domain - an interview, video, article Where there’s a conflict, such as an overly customised CV that contradicts your LinkedIn profile - that can be a problem. Assuming your contents all support each other, the aim is to prompt an action. Unlike an Amazon purchase, you aren’t expecting a sale, simply for the right people to start a conversation that meets your goals. To convert interest into an action, first, you have to be found. Think about an Amazon product page and the process you go through to buy - what do you typically read and in which order? It’s probably something like . My reading journey on a product page is . How does your profile page cater to the reading psychology of a recruiter? While a recruiter likely has access to the Recruiter Licence, you won’t. I’ll write this in a way you can emulate as a standard or Premium Member. A standard search might go across . Leading to this reading priority of someone who wants to read everything (!): #Open to Work banner (your choice) Headline Banner Location / Contact details (depending on connection and privacy settings) Activity / Featured Section / About (the order depends on whether you have Creator mode or not) Experience Education Projects Skills Recommendations Unlike Amazon reviews, I rarely look at recommendations - if I’m still interested by that point, I’ll get in touch. You can also download your profile as a PDF, which looks like a CV with contact details, headline, summary and experience. In both your profile and the downloadable PDF, your headline and summary / About section are going to be read before your experience is. This is where a lot of the decision to contact you will come from. While the career section is important, if an attention-short reader doesn’t get that far, it won’t help convert interest. An exercise to guide your approach to updating your profile Imagine you have been promoted and are tasked with recruiting your replacement. The rules are that you are only allowed to search for candidates on LinkedIn through your standard membership. You have 10 minutes to run and scan through a search and 20 minutes to form a shortlist of 3 top candidates from the results. Location and salary don’t matter for now. It’s likely you’ll search on your job titles, job specific skills and qualifications. What do the results look like? Pick your three favourite profiles from the results. Now compare them against your own profile, step by step. Would you make your own shortlist based purely on the content? If not, what is it about their profiles that is preferable and how can you emulate the same in yours? What is it in their content that has converted you from being a passive reader to having them on your imaginary shortlist? Actionable points to update your profile (and CV too) You want people with hiring authority to look at your profile and want to contact you. How can you help them see you as a candidate of choice? 1. A punchy headline that says what you do and how you can help. The first four words count - those Amazon product headlines. If you don’t read further than the first four words, you’ll never know what you missed. Check out how other people’s headlines look on your mobile phone when on their profile or if they are replying to a comment on a post - lead with relevance 2. Scrap ‘I help companies by’ because it’s meaningless. Start with your job title then add a flourish or context. ‘CTO - deep tech scale-up. Equity backed and privately owned. £20m to £120m in three years’ 3. Your banner - it’s free advertising real estate. Use Canva; include your contact details in case a reader doesn’t have access through your account 4. Make it easy to contact you by phone or email. Put it in multiple spots 5. About section - who do you help and how? What are your key skills and achievements? Keep it concise and focused on your ideal audience - move away from the ‘responsibilities led’ approach to CVs that get copied onto LinkedIn. Show context 6. While your career section is further down and may not even be read, it should still be fully populated and credible 7. How can you highlight posts, videos and articles to support your candidacy? The Featured Section is a useful facility in Creator mode 8. Keywords. Recruiters search on keywords. Remember all the job adverts and required skills you’ve read - does your LinkedIn profile show these suitably? While these need to be true how might differing acronyms and terminology mean the same thing? 9. Personal branding. How can you showcase your personality in your words? Your About Section is a form of elevator pitch. While it highlights your professional credibility you can also show your personal qualities. What are you most passionate about or best at? Lead with that 10. It’s not about you. It’s about the needs of your reader - tell us what we need to know to make an informed decision on your candidacy. Answer the questions that we should have through your content 11. Keep it simple and authentic 12. If there’s something you want us to know, make it clear. This could be anything from the job you want, to part-time status, to highlighting a recommendation you are proud of  I've mentioned ‘CV too’ because the same principles that let you get found apply in all of your documentation - such as on an ATS, on a job board, or with a referral. And because an optimised LinkedIn profile is a further reason why you might not customise your CV (p178).

One of the reasons I've always loved recruitment is because of systems thinking. It's such a multifaceted business, built on marketing, sales, contextual analysis, psychology, copywriting and many other endeavours. Many of which are fields built on replicable systems that we can apply to recruitment. What are the systems that drive behaviour, opinions, decisions and action in recruitment? Well of course psychology has a key part to play. And isn't it just a little bit fascinating into how we can dig into what keeps people in jobs they shouldn't love? Where they could substantively improve their lot by taking a brave decision to make change. Why couldn't we instigate that change through recognising what prevents a decision, through simple messaging? The pain mirror March 2023 “I didn’t realise how unhappy I was until my husband told me,” commented a Strategic Marketing Manager, when she accepted an offer I put forward. I encourage candidates to talk through an offer with their nearest and dearest, as much to allow objectivity, as for the mirror it holds to their emotions. This isn’t the only time I’ve heard this from candidates, when reflecting on their role, before moving on to a new employer. The psychology of ‘loyalty’, self-perception, behaviour and decisions is not discussed enough in recruitment. Psychology that can inform how we approach, engage and build relationships with candidates, especially for those tricky vacancies with a niche requirement. Three concepts to think about in exploring this, then practical takeaways: 1/ Stockholm Syndrome A phenomenon in which hostages develop feelings of affection or loyalty towards their captors. Replace with employee and an employer who is demanding and stressful to work for. 2/ Region Beta Paradox People are more likely to take action over a distressing situation than an acceptably bad one, even if the possible improvement for both is the same. Someone in a mediocre employment relationship is less likely to consider a career move than someone in a Very Bad Situation. These two concepts are linked to 3/ Career inertia – you can be swept up in a career even if diverges from your core values and aspirations. Anyone who has been made redundant, or put on furlough, has an opportunity to break this inertia and find something more aligned with who they want to be. Perhaps that’s something you’ve experienced too. What a great opportunity for recruiters to help candidates identify where they can break inertia and find a better path. For anyone to consider a career move, they will need a ‘good enough reason’ and their situation will dictate what experiences they either need or will put up with. Someone who is unemployed may place paying the bills over long-term happiness. They may put up with an acceptably bad recruitment process to get what they need. Someone who thinks they are happily employed may place their self-perception and loyalty above the promise of something we think is better… even if it is. What does it take to engage them? Of course, for many people, not moving jobs is the best decision they can make. Something we should establish as recruiters as early as possible. When there is ‘good enough reason’, it is individual to every candidate. It’s the pain that needs healing and an illness they may not even have symptoms for. Our job is to hold a mirror up to that pain so that they can identify it for themselves and take measures to rightly improve their lot. It goes to follow that, in any recruitment endeavour, we can aim to understand the situations, needs and drivers of ideal candidates as a priority. What’s in it for them? What Candidate Experience do they need? Whether they might unknowingly suffer from Stockholm Syndrome, and whether they are in Region Beta. As well as the inertia of a career that may or may not be taking them in the wrong direction. Write a bad job advert and you’ll only appeal to people who either need a job or find their current situation bad enough to force change. Who else will they be applying to? (Everyone) Run a bad process, and candidates will stay in it only if its level of badness is acceptable. The same goes for your “brilliant vacancy that matches your LinkedIn profile. Can you send me your CV in Word format?” outreach. Shoddy will work in some situations, but not because of your words – in spite of your words, when situation forces action. It’s easy to think that, when you appeal to candidates, the people you hear back from are the best available. Yet if you haven’t given a candidate ‘good enough reason’, what reason do they even have to respond? Do you even know what you don’t know? I can tell you, that Marketing Manager at the top had seen my good enough advert and chose not to apply. Hers was a great job that met her family needs, and this was a solution to a problem she hadn’t identified. I knew she had chosen not to apply because I coincidentally called her, and during that conversation, we discussed the advert. We had a great chat, and she said towards the end of the call “it does sound good, but I’m not sure it’s right for me”. I asked her to think about it, and perhaps we should speak again on Monday. I also encouraged her to think critically about her current situation, as she divulged she knew she was not content, but couldn’t put her finger on why. What had prompted her to read my advert in the first place? Perhaps this wouldn’t be the right move, but the next one might be. Anyway, she got the job – they made it bigger for her and £5k above budget. The MD tells me she is a future director, and she tells me she is enjoying it. All because we got to the crux of pain she didn’t know she had. Yes, the opposite holds true. If recruitment is easy and candidates are plenty, shoddy may be good enough, so why bother improving? That’s what the unsubscribe button is for. Thanks for reading. Regards, Greg

What follows is an updated version of Chapter 10 from A Career Breakdown Kit (2026) . I've made some additions around what it means to be overqualified, and why this doesn't always mean an employer is ageist. I'm mindful that the market has been extremely tough for many over the past few years, disproportionately affecting more experienced (older) job seekers. So it can be easy to assume that what may be practical business decisions may hide an ism. Yet, that's not always the full picture. In this addition I show that the same advice I give to job seekers about keeping cards close to their chest increases risk of flight risk for employers. This chapter challenges assumptions that are widely held for good reason: experienced workers have faced genuine discrimination. But as with the ATS mythology, incomplete narratives can lead to strategic missteps. What follows is the fuller picture, even where it's uncomfortable. The newsletter format is ideal in this way, given I can update the book on the fly, and that even if I repeat releasing a chapter, it's only because there is significant new or changed information to share. You'll get these chapters here first, with the 2027 edition due for release in the New Year. And don't worry - if you've already bought this year's edition, contact me when the new release is out and I'll send you a free digital version. 10 - On feedback and discrimination Any fair and reasonable recruitment requires three criteria to be met in filling a vacancy: capability, fit and stick. Capability answers the question, ‘Can you fulfil the needs of the vacancy?’ This relates to the immediate problems a vacancy solves and can include you being available in the right time frame. This also includes other dimensions such as forward-planning - for example, looking at the next job as well as this one through succession planning, or having confidential plans that will affect this role in future. I classify the wrong work permit here in the same way a lack of a hard minimum qualification can be a deal breaker. If you aren’t seen to be able to fulfil the role, for whatever reason, this is a capability rejection. The good thing about capability is that this is feedback which should be straightforward to give in an objective process. Fit is whether you are perceived to fit in or add to the business, culture and team. Stick is when you are perceived to remain in post long enough for the employer to see a return on their investment. This includes points like salary affordability and even location, if the employer doesn’t believe your commute is sustainable. And ‘flight risk’ for those considered overqualified. Unlike capability, both these points are mainly subjective. What even is a culture or a sustainable commute anyway? Unfortunately, bias and assumptions are a common occurrence. I say ‘fair and reasonable’ because some employers are not, and even fair and reasonable employers make unfair or unreasonable assumptions. So - three reasons only, yet each comes together in unique ways, both for selection and rejection. A typical process In the market we’ve found ourselves in during the last few years, many vacancies have many candidates who meet all of those criteria above. The sheer volume alone can make it hard to identify the right candidates, more so when applicants may not know how to make their candidacy discoverable. By discoverable, I mean enabling the weakest link in a recruitment chain to see your suitability through the principles covered in Part Three. Here is what a typical vacancy might look like, working backwards, in a 2-stage interview process from a public job advert: One candidate offered the position 2-3 candidates at final interview 5-8 candidates at 1st stage interview 40-50 applicants who show suitable candidacy Another 40-150 applicants who aren’t directly suitable yet have transferable skills A further 150-200 applicants who are wholly unsuitable, which may be for reasons of work permit status or wrong background That could be a total of 400 applications, where only one person gets the job. Now let’s say those 5-8 candidates at 1st stage interview are all excellent, with little to choose between them. What separates those who are selected and those who are declined? You might be a qualified candidate. What’s to say the others aren’t as qualified in their own ways, some of whom might be more suited? Sometimes it’s such fine margins that feedback may be meaningless. I use this example to set the scene - there are other approaches to recruitment, such as headhunting, where the numbers look different. I expect if you are reading this, you have at some point battled your way through a competitive process. If you were ‘pipped to the post’ as a 2nd choice candidate, take solace in being 2nd out of possibly hundreds - that’s an effective performance to build on. When feedback goes wrong If you’ve ever worked in a hiring capacity, you may know that giving feedback can be fraught with consequences. Some years back, an early lesson on what can happen was a conversation I had with a candidate for an HR Director role. This was a maternity leave contract. He was a close 2nd to a strong candidate. There wasn’t anything he might have done differently and, had that candidate declined, they would have been pleased to offer him the position. He took the news and my feedback well, and we agreed to speak again at the earliest opportunity. The following morning, I had a call from the HR Director, who was aghast. She’d received a vitriol-filled email from the candidate after my conversation with him. Accusations, ill wishes and swear words aimed at a professional who was heavily pregnant. Even with the best intentions, seemingly good people can be triggered to act abhorrently. Given that feedback may seemingly overlap with discrimination areas, such as being overqualified, it's no wonder many companies choose to either give platitudes or not to give feedback at all. Generic feedback These all tether to the list at the top, either directly or in a way that doesn’t cause issues. What feedback would you give to someone that is abrasive or offensive at interview? How about someone with atypical body language or communication style? Someone who is down in the dumps? Someone who likes cricket when you like football? Someone who is arrogant and blind to the damage they’ve caused in previous jobs? Someone who is a maintenance mode manager in an environment of rapid change? Some of these descriptions relate to people who are illegally discriminated against, others to people who are simply unpleasant, and many more. ‘ Cultural fit’ may sometimes be the straightforward way to explain a decision. An easy way out with an individual you shouldn’t employ, something that hides poor process, something that hides discrimination, or something else. And sometimes a simple way not to hurt someone’s feelings. Whatever the reason, the worst it can invite is frustration for the candidate, rather than specific feedback which opens a can of worms. Let’s talk about overqualified. A popular social media post is that it’s impossible to be overqualified. The more accurate truth is that there are only two states - you are either qualified or not qualified for a vacancy. You are qualified if you meet the measure of capability, stick and fit. You are unqualified if you don’t meet all three. The use of the word overqualified is a lazy fallback that creates problems unnecessarily in a fair and reasonable process. The common perception is that overqualification relates to seniority, a level of expertise above the requirements for the role, expense or even age, and this can be true. But these aren’t necessarily the reasons behind the use of the word. The real issue with the word is its ambiguity. Hidden context When I recruit for any vacancy, there is typically a context not visible in the employer’s job description. This might be kept back for an interview or remain forever trapped in their heads. One example might be the role trajectory - how it will change over time. It might be a salary budget that has the balance of the team in mind. It might be that the role won’t change at all. From a retention perspective, more junior candidates have more room to grow before it becomes blindingly boring to them. Or it could be that the role is hands-on. A strategic expertise may be too far removed. These might not be articulated clearly yet can be fair selection criteria for declining a candidate - where the recruiter might say overqualified instead. By identifying these points, I can make them clear in my adverts and conversations, and applicants aren’t left bemused by decisions from hidden information. And when I am wrong in my decision, I welcome constructive disagreement to allow clarity. The examples here are simplified - the devil is always in the detail. In most adverts and job descriptions, this key hidden context is often missing, making overqualified hard feedback to take. I’d be annoyed if given that from an application to a generic job description-led advert full of innovative adjectives and no insight. Regrettably, overqualified can also used to hide discrimination. ‘Flight risk’ is a reason for declining a candidate that is often bundled with overqualified. “We think you’ll get bored.” Is intended to take the sting off, complimenting the candidate on their capability. It feels anything but, given candidates interview with intent and all available facts at their disposal. Yet, if you consider that one of the primary decision drivers in recruitment is risk, is there a legitimate concern here. There is a common long term thought process in a tough job search. The first is to compromise and consider why more junior jobs might be sustainable. Maybe it will let you focus on the work you enjoy without the baggage of further responsibility. Then if you were to gain the job, simply to be open minded about better opportunities that might be presented to you. Who knows what the future might bring, and you are likely to commit to this junior role long-term. Should that better opportunity present itself, you simply make an informed decision based on new information that presents itself. This is advice I give to job seekers who are offered a more junior job. Yet, with my recruitment hat on, over the past 2 years, I’ve never seen so many people leave recently taken jobs for better opportunities. Where the employer had “given them a chance”, something any job seeker wants, then lost that colleague with all the disruption it entails. This includes referring a friend to a peer, when they were desperate to leave their job. They’d even have taken minimum wage so bad was their current situation. My peer, following a two interview process, gave them a decent offer, only for them to accept a counter offer shortly after. I wish my friend well – he made the best decision that he could. Yet I have let my peer down through the value of that referral – personal equity. And my peer has let their hiring manager down through the same. These things happen – a common phrase in recruitment. Yet, every time a risk actually happens, it makes it harder to consider that risk in future. What these types of feedback have in common is that they can mean fair, neutral and unfair (and possibly illegal) reasons for declining your application. Unless you have evidence of the harmful connotation, you should assume there is fair reason. Here’s another common reason to unpick - industry experience. Not so much to discuss whether it’s right to reject someone on this basis. More so because it’s often a rejection that happens after an interview process, leading to the common question, ‘Why did they waste my time, when they knew I didn’t have industry experience?’ Industry experience is an example of how selection criteria shift throughout a recruitment process. This might be because of the hierarchy of decision-makers. It’s not uncommon for additional decision-makers to become involved late in the process, who may have a strong objection that wasn’t present earlier. Or how tight calls are judged between candidates. The closer you get to the offer stage, the fewer candidates you compete with. What weren’t issues before can become decision-making factors at the final hurdle, everything else being even. Is feedback worth it? Feedback can be a game changer, particularly when we help candidates overcome blind spots, improve how they play the game, and deliver a better interview. It’s always worth asking for feedback or ways to improve your performance. If that answer isn’t forthcoming, I’d question whether it’s worth pursuing, or if that energy is better spent elsewhere. Assuming you perform well at interview, the question to consider is - when has feedback made a difference to you? If feedback doesn’t make a difference you should act on, is it worth worrying about? Or is it healthier to draw a line through that application, and move forward? What can you do instead? Self-reflection is key. After an interview, think back on the areas you did well and what you might have done differently. For problem questions, write them down and think of better answers for future reference. For questions you felt you answered well - run through them with a friend and ask them to time your response. Waffling never helps. If you find yourself BSing, ask why. Was it a lack of confidence, rusty knowledge, or a gap to overcome? Did you prepare well enough? If answers aren’t coming from elsewhere, look within. How can you better show that you solve the employer’s problems, through your capability, fit and stick? 

What follows is dated in some ways and never more relevant in others. Originally published in January 2023, pretty much a month after ChatGPT was launched and E formalised. What E? "Experience", part of EEAT in how Google prioritises quality of content for organic search rankings. Here it means that content is written by people who have depth of experience in what they claim expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. Trustworthiness has never been more important, with what's changed in content in the past 3 years. Something I find lost when wading through the vast amount of quiet signals in LinkedIn AI content. Something increasingly hard to find in the rising wave of Candidate Resentment , as job seekers wade through conflicting advice and seek succour in beating the ATS bots. And ironically, in that last point, advice from people who often don't have Experience in any recruitment. EEAT is a mechanism for improving how the words of your recruitment process rank with the candidates you want to employ, when they compare you to others on the market. Such as the 12th generic advert of 37, a sloppier communication process than your competitor, or neglecting to show why someone should entertain a conversation with you. It may not be a ranking factor outside of google, yet they've formed it based on their understanding of what consumers should need from content. The same question we must pose of our recruitment. I find we are in a time of low trust, and this has to be the priority, flowing from Experience, Expertise and Authority. The solution for trustworthiness for me, is to place trust in the people we want to bring forwards. Through finding the right balance of radical candour and appropriate transparency, and through simple steps like clearly describing your recruitment process, responding to candidates and listing the salary. As with previous articles, I leave this intact for posterity, warts and all. January 2023 I’m sure we all have Google searches we’d prefer didn’t show up in our browsing history. And while you may not think of researching how to hide a body, no doubt when you have run searches you’ve played around with keywords to get the best results. Maybe you’ve even surfed job boards looking for a (“HR Manager” or “Head of Personnel” or “People Partner”) or some such Boolean string / semantic search, knowing full well there can be ambiguity in nomenclature. I don’t know about you, but when I see a page of search results, I’ll typically ignore the paid ads, and dodgy-looking links, then skim down to find headlines that most closely match my intent. Take my research for this article – “what are the pillars of SEO”? Crikey the results are confusing, with anything from 3 to 900 key pillars on which you must build your SEO, before requiring me to buy their stuff. And ChatGPT is unavailable for comment. Yet each has the common pillars which search engines prioritise to boost those sites’ rankings: 1/ user experience 2/ EAT – expertise, authority and trustworthiness Interesting isn’t it that a company (Google; YMMV) that spends a huge amount of money on their internet technology and makes £billions from securing users into their ecosystem place emphasis on what is written, how it’s written and how it’s experienced by the reader. While companies who trade on the internet build their websites around the rules set by those same search engines. Do they do this because expertise, authority, trustworthiness and experience are nice to have, or do they do it because of the commercial benefit? Yes, yes, there are technical elements to SEO from web page optimisation, to backlinks, to tools and processes like Ahrefs and SEMrush, to meta tags and so on. But think about your own internet searches. Which websites do you trust and why? I’ve no doubt these four content elements have an impact, and with good experience you’ll come back for more. You can boost the search rankings of a website solely by writing good landing pages, informative blogs with the right content, becoming an expert others ask for content from (driving more people to your own content). All for the consequence of shifting product. What happens if we apply those content pillars to recruitment? Let’s consider that people may come across you because they are interested in a which you either have now, have had or will have in future. They’ve become aware of you because of the potential of you being a viable employer at some point. The point of applying these SEO principles is that, when you are ready to hire, and they are open to considering such a vacancy, you’ve done the leg work so that your content sets them in the right direction. I’d start by asking these questions of any content you may have: Does it show expertise? Do you know your stuff? Does it show authority? Or are you hoping for a bite? Does it build trust? Or is it promises promises with no substance? What does the reader experience of these words? What content you ask? Your job adverts Job descriptions Career page ATS LinkedIn posts, comments and connection requests Videos and webinars Interview confirmations Communications, written, verbal and in person Employment contract These latter points may be ‘in process’ yet why wouldn’t you show trustworthiness and authority, or improve their journey and experience? Any piece of content someone you may wish to employ, or otherwise work with, comes across is an opportunity. Of course, I’ve written about similar topics before while discussing the commercial benefit of good candidate experience, conversion rate optimisation (CRO - fundamentally linked to SEO) and last week on branding. Yet while they are similar topics, with overlap, they are different parts of the same conversation. Brand raises awareness, SEO helps you look in the ‘right’ place when you need something, CRO converts, while the overall experience informs your final decision and your advocacy. If you’d like a reminder, click on my email archive . It’s no wonder there are marketing agencies that specialise in each field, while some offer a one-stop full-service mix, all with the purpose of helping clients sell more. From a consumer perspective, if you were aware of Nike as a reputable shoe company, love their marketing, needed a specific type of lightweight trainer, searched on google for shoes that meet these criteria, Nike crops up and the click-through leads to an informative enjoyable optimised experience? Well, you may just end up buying cheap knockoffs at the market, and your feet won’t thank you later. Or you may see that all these elements can come together to improve how you recruit, and the likelihood of filling your vacancies. The next email is on the misleading nature of active and passive candidates. Thanks for reading. Regards, Greg

What follows is Chapter 39 of A Career Breakdown Kit (2026) . It's 10 months old, so surely the algorithm has moved on right? Indeed, my own content performance has tanked if you compare 2026 to 2025. Around 12 million views of my content last year, while if I extrapolate my year to date performance, it looks like a little shy of 640,000 views. My LinkedIn feed is quieter, yet real life relevant conversations go from strength to strength, many of which stem from my content. Look, I don't love the term, but I am a fan of putting your message out there, across multiple means, so that your most relevant audience might become aware of you. And perhaps your relevant audience is an audience of one, a person who can put you nearer that job. Which is the only algorithm you need. This is a three part series, with part 2 on " Content strategy and philosophy " and part 3 on " A flair post ". Click on the links for the unedited versions on Substack. 39 - Introduction to personal branding Whatever you think of LinkedIn, you shouldn’t overlook its nature as a free marketing platform, where you can build a reputation through the words of your posts, comments and messages. Personal branding is a viable tactic as part of a multi-channel approach to your job search and it can bring opportunities to you. I'll start off by saying I'm not a fan of the term personal branding. It can lead to make-work which can even get in the way of what you should be doing. Writing and using content to create experiences that support a job search is a great idea and calling it personal branding - as a discrete activity - isn’t a bad thing. I expect there are many mediums through which you can build a personal brand. I'll focus on LinkedIn because of how entrenched it is in other job search activities. What a personal brand is For businesspeople the idea is that by building awareness of your personality, lifestyle and what you're promoting, you also build trust. So that when people are ready to buy, they'll buy your products. The brand might be personal. The goal is sales. When you see personal branding on LinkedIn it’s often a business that promotes their services through the account of the author. ‘Here’s my puppy, buy my stuff.’ Take note that the target audience for these advice posts is the businesspeople above. And these posts often seek to part them from their money. Your goals are similar. If there’s a commercial outcome you want, it’s likely a single job, not a throughput of leads. You’ll also see that controversial content gets huge engagement and can also repel readers. If you need a job, what’s the danger of writing overly spicy content? Could a reader make a decision against you based on your words? How much you need any job should inform the experience you want to create for your readers. How it sits in your wider job search Publishing content is about raising awareness and starting conversations with the right people. This can be your profile, written posts, newsletters, (bestselling) career breakdown kits, videos, you name it - anything you can become known for. In many ways the hierarchy of relationships your content appeals to is the same as with networking. Content can be publishing posts, commenting on the posts of others, sending direct messages. I’d argue even your applications and interviews are part of your personal brand. I think of LinkedIn posts like a plumber’s van driving around town. Most of the time you’ll disregard the van unless it cuts you up with noxious fumes. When you have a leaky pipe, you’ll surely take note of their number. It can support an application if a hiring manager decides to surreptitiously stalk your profile. And it can work against you if it suggests problem behaviour. A good balance for content is the poster in my daughters’ primary school from a few years back: THINK. Is it True? Is it Helpful? Is it Inspiring? Is it Necessary? Is it Kind? Achieve those five points and content will rarely work against your job search. Content should be consistent with your wider activity. Which means that everything people (potential employers) experience of you is a complementary and non-contradictory message. Content that contradicts your CV or cover letter may lead to red flags, whether that’s fair or not. Content should be intentional. HOW TO GO viral, and why you shouldn’t Anyone who writes content will enjoy the sweet, sweet flow of dopamine when you see reactions and comments trickle in. Such as that first flair post announcing you are available to help your next employer with examples of your achievements and what you are looking for. Do that and you’ll get loads of engagement. Why haven’t you done it yet? Tag me in and I’ll support you. Or you can do what most people do and say, ‘I’m sorry to announce I’ve lost my job, please help’ and that will get loads too. Because it is relevant and relatable to fellow job seekers, recruiters and sympathisers. Then you feel the soul-crushing defeat of a well-thought-out post, highlighting a problem in your industry, with tumbleweed to follow. Both types of content have a place. That tumbleweed post is relevant and relatable to a niche audience. I try to take a land and expand approach to content - job seeker advice, recruitment advice and stories, ponderings and satire, which I use to tackle topics from different directions. Over the past three years I’ve had between 3m to 11m views of my posts and I’ve gained a bit of business through them too. What I don’t do is try to go viral anymore. Because when I have gone viral with a few 1m impression posts, it’s taken weeks to extricate myself from them and there hasn’t been real benefit. I find my tumbleweed posts start better conversations from lurkers - those that never engage publicly. I promised you I’d show you how to go viral. Here you go. Relevance + relatability + readability + entitlement. Maybe add a selfie. If that seems too simple, search for this sentence on LinkedIn: “An employee asked me if he can WORK from HOME permanently.” You’ll need to use the double speech mark to search on the phrase, and rank by Posts. ‘Does it really work?’ asked Charles. I told him to try it as an experiment. He rarely got more than a few hundred impressions per post. 170,000 impressions, 2,000 reactions. Pretty viral for a first timer. It is the wrong path. What do these posts actually say? Who are they aimed at? And if they don’t appeal to people who can help you reach your objective, what’s the point? 

I was tempted to use another Tom Cruise AI image for this article, but his hands ended up looking like feet, which wasn't a true representation of him. Probably not fair to use AI in this way either, stealing copyrighted material without permission. And so I use this AI 'stock image' instead, which is probably also highly unethical, but feels more suitable and sufficient . Anyway here's an article about why the same principles are crucial for good recruitment: ‘True and Fair’ is an accountancy concept that lies at the heart of reporting, and can be applied effectively in recruitment. Its meaning is that any financial statement made about a company should accurately and completely represent its financial position and performance. The role of auditing is to confirm that documentation meets this definition. Do so and everyone knows what they are dealing with. HMRC, shareholders, customers, suppliers, employees – useful, and in many cases necessary, to have access to a true and fair view of a company’s accounts. Can something be true and not fair? In 2001, Enron went bust, a huge scandal with real-life repercussions that led to new legislation in the US. Their accounts were true, in that they conformed with the required laws and standards. However they had an incredibly complex reporting structure which made it impossible to see the overwhelming debt they had. Poof! Bye-bye a $100bn company when this all came out in the wash. How about fair but not true? This can happen if a situation is described which gives a fair picture but lacks accuracy. An example here could be the UK politician who HMRC deemed behaved fairly but made errors in his tax reporting. Only a few million quid plus penalty. What types of recruitment documentation does this apply to? Three key ones that spring to mind (although there’s no reason it can’t be applied everywhere): The job description. The job advertisement. The CV. If these three documents were always a true and fair representation of either a job or a candidate, you’d interview and hire better candidates who stick around longer. With the caveat that these documents should also be ‘suitable and sufficient’, if you remember last week's edition. Documents are the first step in a recruitment process, relating to a decision to apply and the decision to interview. Is it not the case, that the second most common complaint in recruitment is “not what we expected”? Therefore, if we nipped this complaint in the bud, with true and fair documentation, wouldn’t life be better for everyone in the recruitment process? What does true and fair mean in recruitment documentation? I think it has to cover three points. 1/ factually correct 2/ shows context suitably 3/ describes sufficiently An immediate objection might be that job descriptions are always true and fair, but I’d argue this is actually rarely the case. If you recruit for a new role, do you audit your job description against the current context? If you have a generic job family description does it show the specific day-to-day duties of a role? Have things changed in the current role that makes it different to the last time you recruited? A common scenario in recruitment is that Greg resigns, and the hiring manager says “we’d love someone just like Greg”. Yet if Greg resigned, wouldn’t someone just like Greg be at risk of resigning for the same reasons in future? Would now-Greg have applied for the same role that then-Greg applied for? Which definition of Greg is the true and fair one you’d hire? It feels strange writing my name like this. There are lots of different situations in which a job description that was true and fair a few years ago is no longer so. The only way to ensure it is true and fair, is to audit documentation prior to going live. You may think a fully representative and accurate contextual analysis is too time-consuming for most vacancies, especially where it doesn’t actually matter if there is some inaccuracy. “Oh yeah, that’s not relevant anymore”. But if you have a key hire that can make a difference in your business, ‘true and fair’ should be the starting point, each and every time. If you have a systematic process that finds truth and fairness, you’ll see the benefit of applying the same across any vacancy – for the reason that the time invested at the outset is offset by interviewing fewer unsuitable candidates and wasting less time and resources overall. And what should be the more important reason of better recruitment outcomes. For any project I take on, this is the first step – getting the documentation in order. Get it right and everything flows from there. It’s a key reason behind my nearly 100% fill rate. It’s also one of the reasons my average tenure is over 4 years for key hires. These achievements don’t come down to chance. They come from my process. If you've forgotten why suitability and sufficiency is the other pillar, here's an example that isn't suitable: Nineteen experiential bullet points might be true and fair but will also encourage ideal candidates to run away screaming. See you next time. Regards, Greg p.s. While you are here, if you like the idea of improving how you recruit, lack capacity or need better candidates, and are curious how I can help, these are my services: - commercial, operational and technical leadership recruitment (available for no more than two vacancies) - manage part or all of your recruitment on an individually designed basis for one client. This can be a large as end-to-end delivery of a programme of vacancies, or as small as writing one job advert for a key hire- recruitment strategy setting - outplacement support

What follows it Chapter 8 in A Career Breakdown Kit (2026) . Like a lot of the chapters it's both too long and not long enough. Too long because who wants to read 9 pages of navel gazing on the recruitment industry. Not long enough because one of the most helpful things you can do at the start of a job search is to understand what you are dealing with, and the rules of the game. So this might have provided even more detail to cover the specific categories of recruiters you might build relationships with. I've tried to find a balance that makes you think differently. When you see the word 'recruiter' you might have an expectation of how they'll help you, but that word and it's brothers and sisters can be so wide ranging as to mean nothing. It's regrettable that I often get replies from job seekers that show annoyance that I can't help them directly. "Did you look at my profile - it's what you do?" sort of thing. So this may be a valuable read in showing what candidates are for recruiters, the different ways in which we work, how we are often held back by the system we work in, and how this might inform your strategy. And if you still have questions, you can join me and Simon Ward on Tuesday 24th at 1pm GMT for our LinkedIn Live on this subject. I'll include the link here on this article when it's ready. 8 - How recruiters work This chapter illustrates standard recruiter working practices and why they lead to some of the experiences commonly talked about among job seekers. This is about managing your expectations, by lifting the curtain on recruitment. I’ll use broad terms where applicable and a steer on how others may use more obscure terminology. What a candidate is If you jump on any recruiter website, I’m pretty sure the vast majority will say something along these lines: ‘We’re disrupting the market with better candidate experience.’ As well as a lot of promises of being different in a way that looks much the same as everyone else. And yet your experiences will differ wildly. Part of this may be generic marketing. Based on many discussions with fellow recruiters, my belief is that the industry definition is different to a job seeker’s definition. Many hiring processes see candidates as an employable person being considered for a job. I use this terminology myself. For example, a job advert may have 99 applications, while only 5 are potential candidates - because they meet the criteria of the role and the remaining applicants don’t. The nuance of this definition is that the more cynical the process, the worse the memory retention of which candidates were assessed. Some companies may have seen you as a candidate at 2nd stage interview, then completely forget about you if they’ve discounted you from the process - you are no longer a candidate. Using this definition, many recruiters think they give a first class of candidate experience because they only relate it to the people they think of as candidates. This is equally true of someone who treats everyone decently and those who only treat people they place into jobs decently. On the other hand, pretty much anyone who looks at new employment sees themselves as a candidate for that employment. Assuming you are accountable, you wouldn’t apply for any job you didn’t see yourself as suitable for. Even if you chose not to apply, it’s not necessarily because you didn’t see yourself as a candidate. It may be that even though you are a suitable candidate for that vacancy, your experience of the process made you choose to step away - which might be as simple as not liking the advert or email you read. This last point relates to the phenomenon of candidate resentment (p89). There’s another industry nuance to the candidate definition. In the same way you may have heard about the hidden jobs market, recruiters talk about the passive candidate market: ‘80% of candidates aren’t looking for a job, and these are the best candidates.’ Not my words, btw. A passive opportunity (p160) explores why this happens and how you can use the same principles to improve your odds. If you think it odd that I’ve started ‘How recruiters work’ with a discussion on candidates, it’s because our relationship with our candidates is a sign of how we work with employers. Without placing candidates in one form or another, most recruiters wouldn’t make any money. It is deeply integrated into how we work. Different agency recruitment models Typically, agency fees come from the successful placement of staff irrespective of the nature of work. The fee is often a percentage of salary and in most situations is budgeted separately from the new employee's pay. The overall steps recruiters often work to are these: Receive job description from employer Advertise job (on a job board or through outreach like DMs and calls) Find and submit qualified candidates Arrange interviews Coordinate offer process The differentiators are the quality of information at each step and how rigorously they are executed. For example, my requirement for recruiting a vacancy is a full consultation on the company, vacancy, context and culture, which I summarise in writing in a detailed candidate pack. Where there are issues, I advise the employer on how we can overcome them. There are variations around this type of process. Some agencies may rely more on a video presentation, others may ‘sell in’ candidates. Some agencies will use psychometrics or other types of assessments. Some will meet all candidates, some won't even talk to them. The general steps have a lot of crossovers. Contingency The most popular recruitment model is akin to 'no win, no fee'. In the UK, it’s estimated that the average fill rate is between 20% and 33%. This is a range from several sources, although it’s next to impossible to pinpoint accurately. At the lower end, for every vacancy filled, that recruiter won’t fill four vacancies. Therefore, their fee implicitly accounts for unfulfilled work. The reason it’s low is that most vacancies provided to recruiters are given on a ‘multi-agency’ basis and even in competition with the employer themselves. A lot of contingency recruitment is first past the post, in that a submitted CV is seen to be owned by the agency which submitted it first. Let’s say Joe Recruiter has to fill 3 vacancies a month to hit target. At a 20% fill rate, he works on 15 vacancies a month. You can see how this might impact quality of service if there are multiple different candidates for each role. And if the race is on to get CVs over as quickly as possible. This can result bad behaviours like refusing to divulge company information (for fear of divulging competitor secrets) to trying to find out who you are interviewing with (which may be to use them as leads). And classics like ghosting and poor responsiveness. It isn’t necessarily the case. There are some great contingency recruiters out there who work closely with employers, often with exclusivity. When I was a pure contingency recruiter, my fill rate varied between 50% and 70% annually. It’s higher consistently now, though I don’t work contingently anymore. Other models The traditional counterpoint to contingency is retained where we receive a portion of a fee up front to service a vacancy. This requires exclusivity and better access to hiring information. Retained isn’t intrinsically better than contingency - both have their issues, challenges and opportunities. It can lead to mutual obligation from the employer while allowing a more quality focused approach to candidate work, resulting in a better experience for everyone. A different approach is RPO (recruitment process outsourcing ) whereby a third party manages recruitment for the employer. Over the past few years, we’ve seen other models come through, from subscription types (bizarrely called Recruitment as a Service ), to embedded / insourced / fractional (acting as an in-house recruitment function as a third party) to Uber-style apps. Different types of agency recruiter There are as many types of agency recruiter as there are recruitment models. What complicates matters is that as an industry we sometimes try to hide what we do by clever names. Am I a boutique headhunter or am I a recruiter? Or a Talent Ecosystem Intelligence Officer? I’m proud to be a recruiter who wears my process on my sleeve. Whatever we term ourselves the nature of an agency will inform whether they might help you: Temps / interim Where you sign up for temporary work on an hourly or daily rate employed through a contract for service. While Interim recruitment also relates to temporary projects it is quite different. Interims have a skills set a traditional employee doesn’t have. They provide a service through their limited company, held outside of IR35 (off-payroll working regulations). The agency will make money on a margin / markup based on your pay. Permanent An agency that works mainly on permanent vacancies typically paid on filling a job, by the employer. Many agencies offer both. Specialist These are typically recruitment agencies that specialise in a domain. This could be a broad industry like manufacturing or professional services, or a market vertical like marketing or HR. It doesn’t necessarily mean they have specialist knowledge of the roles they recruit, although this can be the case. It means more that they regularly recruit a specific type of role. Generalist These won’t have one specialty and may work closer with certain employers across a variety of vacancies. They might be pure scattergun. You may find them excellent for the one vacancy you are in discussion for, yet that’s the only time they’ll have something for you. Headhunter This can mean many things. The idea is that headhunters access passive candidates who don’t apply for jobs. Although many use the same tools other recruiters do. Some won’t advertise at all. Others might advertise alongside other activities. The crux of the message for employers is that they have a capability beyond what employers can achieve themselves, which can be true. Executive Search Typically, this works on a retained basis for board level appointments. It’s rare to see these roles advertised. They use many of the same proactive channels others do and may cultivate a specific network of contacts who are go-to candidates. Some are so niche they may not go outside of their network. And many more It doesn’t matter so much how a recruiter works, more that they can be a conduit to your next job. Two points come from the sections above: 1/ that candidate experience is hard to deliver consistently when dealing with the volume of vacancies you see in a contingency model, and takes intent in other models, 2/ that agencies are paid to fill jobs, not explicitly to help find people jobs. That second point can cause much frustration if you assume it’s the job of a recruiter to help you find a role, especially when our marketing talks about how we help candidates. Recruitment is often a short-term business. It’s rare that you’ll see recruiters cultivate long-term relationships with job seekers if they can’t help you directly. This is ironic, considering many job seekers will reciprocate the help they’ve received with people they’ve built trust with. Doubly ironic, when it’s someone with hiring authority that gets radio silence from previous suppliers. It’s common to hear of job seekers blacklisting agencies for poor service - frustrating, demoralising and occasionally crushing to be on the end of bad experience. Don’t let a bad process get in the way of what might be good employment. This is as true at the employer end as with agencies. With agencies, the onus is often on winning the next vacancy, rather than giving service to people who may or may not be candidates. Their client may not even know how those agencies work with candidates. These same agencies may have further vacancies you could be seen as a good candidate for with different employers. At the same time, many hiring managers have never been trained on recruitment or interviewing, while being busy at work. This can lead to a poor experience as a candidate compared with what they would be like to work with. The internal recruiter These are recruiters employed directly by the employer to fulfil their recruitment. Often these are called Talent Acquisition Managers, Internal Recruiter, or Recruitment Manager. More than filling vacancies, they manage the system of recruitment. There are many specialist domains within talent acquisition including workforce planning, retention, enablement, marketing and branding. It’s a field that is overwhelmed by a large number of redundancies and where internal recruiters are often overburdened. When working on vacancies, the priority is to fill them. This can lead to frustration if you ask corporate recruiters, ‘Do you have any jobs I might be suitable for?’ Whether or not there is an argument that they could help you, it’s more effective to do the work yourself. Research the business areas they recruit for and ask directly ‘could you tell me who is the best contact for ‘ or ‘when are you likely to recruit for these roles?’ Help them help you. Takeaways There’s much to talk about on this subject and I’ve no doubt I’ve missed glaringly obvious topics. Equally, it’s easy to oversimplify what is a huge and complex industry. It’s worth learning the rules of the recruitment game when you can. Be curious and ask questions. While we should be criticised for poor behaviour, if you don’t understand why a recruiter works in a certain way, please don’t assume it’s for bad reason. Recruitment is a stressful job at the best of times. This can lead to thick skin and callous behaviour. It’s not an excuse, more a symptom of the system we all work in.