Shane Le Mar - CV Review Correspondence/Chris Oshea

Over the course of the Holiday’s I made a drastic attempt to bolster up my chances of employment. As stated in my previous Blog Post I’ve already attempted to make contact with Recruitment Agencies (some more helpful than others) but I also contacted non-creative industry agencies. The main contact I aimed to make was with CV checking companies, these are companies that have access to a piece of software called ATS (Application Tracking System) which all major employers use to sift through mounds of CV’s extracting vital letters, word combinations and summaries and then procedural deleting over 70% of CV’s sent in. If you were one of the lucky 30% it puts together a simple 100-word paragraph about you being a blunt and black and white as possible so that recruiters don’t have to spend forever reading filler.

In layman terms it is a computer that rips the cold hard facts from a CV in order to hire only the best possible employee (on paper). I inquired if the creative industries use this and I was told by Chris Oshea (professional CV Reviewer and recruiter) that they use it more than any other industry as they receive huge numbers of applicants.

Then she got to looking at my CV (which was a creative CV) and that did not go well. She told me that unless I can guarantee 100% that my CV will end up on a desk of a real human then that is never the way to go, they look good, but computers don’t care and just get confused by the extra rubbish. She then ran my Creative CV through the software and it generated this paragraph about me that would be shown to employers.

“Paul Alborough has been working in the Media occupational sector with no real industrial experience. So far Paul has not gained any managerial experience”

Of course, my name is not Paul but as his name was on there as a reference/experience it extracted that instead of my name. It is a very brutal paragraph and shows all the ‘padding’ you put into CV’s is very unnecessary and almost never considered. So as nice as a creative CV is it should only ever live on your portfolio website and almost never submitted. 

There was a lot more that I learnt that is hard to word so to know more please ask me.