How a well formatted CV wins placements

A strong candidate can still lose a placement over presentation.Whilst they might literally be the best candidate on paper, if the CV is poorly formatted or left unbranded, the likelihood is it will just fade into the background with the rest. So whilst formatting CVs is often seen as an admin tax, it’s one that is worth paying if you want to make the placement.

What poor candidate presentation actually costs

Picture the scenario: a genuinely strong candidate, badly packaged. The CV is formatted differently to the last one the client saw, the layout buries the relevant experience halfway down page two, and the client moves on before reaching the part that would have mattered. The client never said no to the candidate, they said no to the presentation.

It’s the one thing that stops great candidates getting to interview more than anything else and it happens more often than most agencies would like to admit. Presentation quality usually varies from recruiter to recruiter (or how rushed the Marketing Assistant is!) and how the candidate has laid out their original CV. With many variables at play, this leads to clients receiving some remarkably well branded CVs and some that look like they’ve been done by your three year old cousin - a good effort, but not going up in the Louvre any time soon. 

SImply put, clients want quality, consistently. If you’re not able to give them that, then you're missing out on interviews, placements and revenue.

Why manual CV formatting is seen as an admin tax

I think we can all agree that well formatted CVs are important when it comes to presenting a candidate, so why is it seen as a tax?

For one, reformatting eats into time. And that’s time that could be used going into calls, prepping candidates,  sending out offers or one of the other many tasks that fill a recruiters desk.

It’s seen as a cost of doing business. It often feels like the fiddly business of updating headers, changing fonts and moving CV sections is an arbitrary task that clients request and that doesn’t have much impact. But when viewed as a touchpoint with clients

Finally, it’s just not that interesting. Who would want to spend hours manually anonymising 10 CVs when you could be finding that next great client?

What good presentation actually needs to do

A properly formatted CV needs to do one job well: land the candidate's strengths against the specific opportunity, in the client's language, quickly. That means the CV highlights the experience that matters and stands out from the other CVs that are submitted. It also needs to adhere to any specific submission requirements of the client.

Consistency matters here. A client who sees the same clean format every time an agency sends a candidate starts to associate that format with quality, before they've even read the detail.

Presentation is the shortest path between a strong candidate and a paid fee

None of this replaces having a genuinely strong candidate to put forward. What it does is stop a strong candidate losing out to something as fixable as formatting. More specs sent, more conversations started, more placements made, because the presentation isn't the thing standing between the candidate and the client anymore.

A great candidate poorly presented is a missed placement. Fixing presentations isn't an admin tidy-up, it's one of the more direct ways to protect fees that are already sitting in the pipeline.