Recruiter CV Example

If you write a recruiter CV that's more professional and engaging, it will help you progress through the ATS screening stage. Ultimately, it will also give you the best chance to impress the hiring manager, which will boost your prospects of reaching the interview stage. Let’s take a closer look at the key parts of a CV and how to develop them for maximum impact.

Key sections for a recruiter CV

Your strategy for writing a recruiter CV will depend heavily on your experience, your level of seniority and the requirements listed in the job description.

However, regardless of your years of experience, a recruiter CV needs to connect the dots of your career into a cohesive story. In the following sections, we’ll dive into the specific chapters of your CV step-by-step, showing you how to refine everything from your initial introduction to your long-term achievements.

CV Header

Start your recruiter CV by adding a professional-looking header that contains all your relevant contact information. Include your name, email address, phone number and location (your full address isn't typically necessary for UK job applications). Additionally, including your LinkedIn profile as a URL can be useful, as it will help the reader to quickly and easily access further information about your career and credentials.

For UK applications, it's not usually a good idea to add a personal photo or any other personal details, such as your age, gender, nationality or ethnicity. These can risk introducing bias to the selection process and, as such, are often discouraged in job adverts under the terms of the Equality Act 2010.

CV Objective

The first section below your CV header is typically your CV summary. This short paragraph outlines some of your key skills, achievements and experience, so employers can quickly get an impression of whether you have the right credentials for the recruiter job. A CV summary focuses on your key skills and achievements, while a CV objective provides an alternative approach, showcasing your career ambitions and how the role fits with these. This makes a CV objective ideal for entry-level candidates.

In your summary or objective, write up to three sentences outlining your key skills, unique personal qualities and career achievements or ambitions, taking care to always reflect the requirements listed in the job description.

An effective summary will include brief reference to one or two of your strongest skills, ensuring they reflect the skills listed in the job description. It's important to make your skills and qualities feel unique to you, and show how you've used them to positive effect in your career to date. See below for an example of a strong recruiter CV summary, featuring quantifiable evidence of your impact and concise, easy-to-read sentences.

Above is an example of a less effective CV summary, with some subtle, yet notable differences. There are several factors that could make your summary less engaging. These include using long, poorly-structured sentences, failing to add evidence of your impact, being too generic with the skills you mention and not adapting your CV summary to specifically respond to the job description.

Work Experience

The work experience section of a CV is usually the most important part. Employers look for evidence of how you've developed and used your skills to good effect in your career to date, as an indication of your likely future performance. Ensure you tailor your work experience section to reflect the job description and show you meet all the essential requirements. This means picking out skills and qualities as keywords and reflecting them back in your work experience bullet points, so employers can assess your likely fit for the role.

This section should contain a list of your most relevant previous jobs in the last 10 or 15 years. Add the job title, the name of the employer, its location and your dates of employment. Include detail in bullet points, outlining the skills you used in the role and the impact they made.

Standing out with your CV work experience section means using action verbs and measurable outcomes to show the impact you made. You'll want to outline a progression in your skills development, and list evidence of the value you added. Here's an example of best practice in a recruiter CV work experience section:

Take a look at a less strong recruiter CV work experience section above. A less-engaging work experience section might include irrelevant roles or jobs from a long time ago, and generic information that fails to address the requirements of the job description. It could also lack evidence to support the claims made in the bullet points.

Education and Qualifications

Your education section should showcase your most recent and highest qualifications, paying particular attention to anything that's specifically required for the role.

To embark on a career as a recruiter, you don't tend to need a specific degree. However, you should still add your highest and most relevant certifications, training and formal qualifications to your CV's education section, even if not specified in the job description. These might include CIPD Level 5 Diploma, or any training that shows your skills in employment law knowledge or candidate sourcing strategies.

When listing your qualifications in your education section, select only the most suitable qualifications and list them in reverse-chronological order, starting with the most recent and working backwards. When adding each qualification, include the name and level of the award, the institution, its location (if necessary), and the dates you attended or graduated. It can also be valuable to add bullet points outlining your key achievements and activities, such as projects you worked on, modules you completed, awards you won or societies you participated in while studying.

It may also be useful for you to add any specialist industry qualifications, certifications or licences that you might require for the role. If you choose to add these, remember also to add an expiration date, if the licence requires renewal in the future.

Skills

Your CV's skills section CV's skills section is a great place to showcase some of the key skills necessary for the role. Check the job description to understand which skills are most essential, and provide a combination of hard and soft skills, reserving space to include some unique qualities that can help you to stand out from the competition. In a recruiter CV, only list the most relevant and essential skills you possess, such as negotiation and employment law knowledge, to make a positive first impression and show you're qualified for the recruiter position.

Hard Skills

Hard skills refer to the technical and specialist skills required for the everyday duties of the job. They might include specialist knowledge, or the use of certain software and equipment. You can gain these skills through study, training or industry experience, and they might require a licence or certification. For recruiter jobs, critical hard skills you've gained in your career can include employment law knowledge, and candidate sourcing strategies. After reviewing the job description, compile a list of four or five key hard skills for your recruiter CV to show you're capable of carrying out the duties required for the role.

The ideal hard skills section will feature the most essential hard skills from the job description, while closely reflecting your own best technical abilities. The closer your strongest skills are to matching the job description, the higher your chances of success.

See below for examples of skills that are frequently included in the hard skills section of a recruiter CV:

Soft Skills

Your soft skills list should contain a list of your personal strengths that make you suitable for the role, and a good fit for the team and the organisation. In contrast to hard skills, these tend to be transferable and applicable to different roles and levels. As a result of rapid technological changes in the world of work, soft skills are becoming ever-more valued by employers. Soft skills can also be particularly valuable for junior or entry-level roles where candidates haven't necessarily had the time to develop hard skills and career achievements.

Similar to your hard skills section, it's best to first review the job description to know which soft skills to focus on in your recruiter CV. You'll want to include a combination of soft skills that you can provide evidence for throughout your CV. Draft a list of up to five key soft and transferable skills, combining the most essential skills from the job description with your strongest personal qualities.

The section below provides an overview of soft skills often highlighted in a recruiter CV.

Languages

If you speak any additional languages, you might want to consider adding a languages section to your CV. Even if languages aren't a requirement of the job description, speaking a foreign language can reflect well on you as a candidate, and correlate with other soft skills that can increase your employability. Under this section, list any foreign languages you speak to a professional standard, with an indicator of your competency level for each.

There are several ways to cite your proficiency in foreign languages. Firstly, you could use a simple descriptive word to indicate your abilities, such as:

• English: Fluent
• Spanish: Intermediate

You might wish to use an internationally recognised standard for your language skills, such as the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR). This divides your language skills into the following categories:

• A1: Beginner
• A2: Elementary
• B1: Intermediate
• B2: Upper intermediate
• C1: Advanced
• C2: Proficiency

Certifications and Training

If you have extra qualifications beyond the basics of what's expected or required for the role, you might want to include a separate certifications section in your CV. It can enhance your chances of success to show specific training and certifications. Not only do these prove you're qualified for the role, but they also indicate proactivity and a dedication to professional development. In addition, some roles require specific licences or training just to be eligible for the job, making the certifications section more important. This might include technical roles or positions which require the operation of specialist software, equipment or machinery.

These example certifications and licences are ideal for candidates applying for recruiter roles:

Optional Sections

Including optional sections in addition to the core sections of your recruiter CV can help you to show employers you're a strong candidate for the job. Consider optional sections for your CV if you're looking for ways to show you're right for the job, beyond your work experience. Optional sections are particularly valuable if you haven't had the chance to build up relevant work experience, for example, if you're applying for entry-level roles or you're changing careers to a new industry or role.

You can find more detailed advice on tailoring your CV in our career resources, where we cover proven ways to highlight your skills effectively.

Hobbies and Interests

If you participate in hobbies and activities that are related to the role, or use some of the same skill set, you could include them in a hobbies and interests section. In addition, this section is the ideal way to show aspects of your personality that might not otherwise shine through in your CV, helping to offer a point of difference compared to other candidates. However, a hobbies and interests section is only valuable if it helps you to show relevant skills you've been unable to evidence in other parts of your CV. If your hobbies and interests are unrelated to the job, it's best to leave them off your CV.

Achievements and Awards

Creating a section for your achievements and awards can help you draw attention to the things you're most proud of in your career to date. In your list, add any awards you've won, industry recognition or key career milestones that tell a story about your suitability for the role and place you ahead of other candidates.

Volunteer Roles

Listing any previous voluntary work is another useful way of showing you have the necessary skills and experience for the job. If you don't have much relevant work experience, either because you're a junior candidate or you're changing jobs from an unrelated field, volunteering can provide valuable examples of your skills in action. In your volunteering section, use a similar structure to your work experience section.

Add your job title or a description of the volunteer role, the organisation name, its location and the dates you volunteered (start and end date). Under this, add bullet points to show the skills you used, and evidence of how they contributed to positive achievements for the organisation.

Most impactful action verbs for a recruiter CV

Adding strong action verbs to the bullet points in your CV's work experience section is a great way to focus on the key skills required for the job, while showing the impact you've made. Start each bullet point with an action word that reflects the job description, so the reader can easily identify your best qualities. Always remember to back up any action verbs you use with evidence that shows the impact it made and the achievements that it led to. Use past tense for action verbs that describe previous roles, and present tense for your current position.

Full example of recruiter CV

Now that we've covered the main sections to include in your recruiter CV, we can see how it would all come together in its final form in the example below:

To see how your CV might look after finalising its design and layout, take a look at our CV examples.

Guide to making your CV ATS compatible

Many employers now use applicant tracking systems (ATS) to assist with managing the recruitment process. One of the key elements of most ATS apps is the ability to scan CVs and rank them according to their likely match to the job description. This task can relieve some of the strain on hiring managers through the recruitment process, which can become very resource-intensive, with roles often eliciting hundreds of applications.

Because ATS software is becoming more common in the recruitment process, it's important to make some concessions in your CV to give yourself the best chance of progressing beyond the initial screening. With that in mind, here are some tips on preparing your CV for ATS screening:

• Include keywords and phrases from the job description that are easy for ATS apps to identify, and help make you appear a strong fit for the role.
• Use standard CV headings that make your CV easier to navigate, such as 'work experience', 'education' and 'skills'.
• Choose a simple, standard CV structure and omit any design elements that might make your CV less easy to read by automated systems, such as text boxes and columns.
• Select a widely-used font in either serif or sans serif style, with a font size between 10 and 12 for body text and 14 and 16 for heading text.
• Use bullet points throughout your CV in place of full sentences. This serves a few purposes, reducing the overall length, helping keywords stand out and making it overall more scannable by ATS apps.

You might feel there are a lot of things to remember when writing an ATS-compatible CV, but with just a few small tweaks, you can ensure yours passes this stage. Use one of our expert-designed, ATS-compatible CV templates to avoid the stress of adapting your CV for ATS screening.

Key takeaways for an impactful recruiter CV

To stand out from the crowd with your CV, tailor your approach to each individual application, incorporating keywords and phrases that match the job description. Pick a CV format that matches your experience level, and focus on showing the reader how you've developed relevant skills and put them to good use to add value for previous employers.

Finally, building your CV using Jobseeker's HR-approved CV templates can help to catch the eye of recruiters and hiring managers, making your application stand out and giving you the best chance of gaining your dream job.

Sources:

1. Barnet Council (UK local government), Recruitment tips: How to write a supporting statement
2. Jobseeker, HR Trends