My reply to a recruiter who asked for my CV

8 points by Soarez 13 years ago | 21 comments

Hey Matthew,

I really am glad you want to help me find a good opportunity to work in London. But I feel we're starting on the wrong foot.

I do not maintain a CV. And if I did, I would only reflect some information that is already public on LinkedIn. I do make some effort to keep my LinkedIn profile updated. I am a firm believer that CVs are thing from the past, they have been deprecated in favor of: - LinkedIn, besides containing the same information, there are other benefits like social factors. e.g. groups, recommendations, connections, - A public github/codeplex/bitbucket (or any other kind of social coding platform) profile where one can look at an applicant's real work. We're talking real code on real projects. - A personal motivation letter - Probably the single most important piece of an application. Considering these factors, I do not see any value in a traditional CV.

This rationale may only apply to Developers, Programmers and Software Engineers. But it is after all the field I'm interested in.

If you seek some additional information that I do not have public in my LinkedIn profile you can feel free to ask for it.

If you need a document with my experience and education, feel free to use LinkedIn to export my profile to a PDF.

Cheers,

Metatron 13 years ago |

If a recruiter wants to give an employer a list of candidates, and logically wants to give info on those candidates all in the same format, then the CV works. Sure it doesn't work as well as LinkedIn profiles, as CVs come in many shapes these days, all trying to outdo each other in style. But not everyone is on LinkedIn yet, and CVs are still the established norm.

If I had a candidate refuse to give me a CV, and told me to look at his LinkedIn profile, I'd assume he was a dick, and hard to work with. That candidate would be filtered out straight away. Not because I think I'm being too stubborn about wanting to see a CV, hell LinkedIn can make a CV for you, but because the candidate was being stubborn, and rude.

It sounds like you have the advantage of being sought after in this case though, and so some power does reside in your hands to be careless with your approach to job offers. But I wouldn't suggest that everybody takes after your example, for some a job offer is a precious thing, and promoting yourself in the format desired by the employer is a length those people would happily endeavour to fulfil.

Soarez 13 years ago | |

I agree, there was never a concrete job proposal. And I should be clear, that If my priority was to get the job then maybe I would not have been so honest in my reply and would have made an effort to send him a pretty CV.

ig1 13 years ago |

Expecting a Linkedin page to work like a CV is like expecting your company homepage to work like a landing page. Sure it might meet the technical requirements of supplying the reader information they need, but your conversion rate is going to suck.

Your CV is a piece of marketing material and you should treat it as such.

Soarez 13 years ago | |

Good point. I admit that if I weren't so lazy maybe I'd spend some time creating a nice CV.

codegeek 13 years ago |

It really depends on the specific situation. If a recruiter approaches me directly, then the ball is in my court. If I have to approach a recruiter, then I assume that they have an upper hand (usually).

I do not send over my Resume/CV to a recruiter who approaches me until he gives me the following:

1. Who is the end client and what location

2. What is the min. rate OR can he match my desired rate ?

3. type of job (fulltime,contract , right to hire etc?)

4. What is the client looking for a.k.a job description? (This one is usually vague unless the recruiter really understands the domain. But I can figure it out if it is in my specific domain of expertise)

Once he gives me these 4, I become very responsive if I am interested and give him everything he wants including the boring Resume/CV and the whole nine yards.

grabeh 13 years ago |

You make a case for the redundancy of CVs but then at the end point him in the direction of what is effectively a CV. If you're going to point him in the direction of a CV substitute, I would just attach a copy to the email to save the hassle of him going to your Linkedin profile.

kls 13 years ago | |

There are ways to reduce the redundancy, like using LinkedIn as the primary data store and then setting up a macro to generate your resume from that data store. This way the CV reflects all of the updated made to the single authoritative source, yet can be formatted into a more traditional CV.

lmg643 13 years ago |

I think the logic behind this response is valid, but in my experience with recruiters 9 / 10 of them would not go for this. (Would love to hear how it works for you!) Recruiters are not the same as dealing with a company directly, they are paid agents with certain rules of decorum.

The real point here is that companies that rely on recruiters generally have something broken about their culture. For a small firm, their management is probably not plugged into the industry, or they have become bureaucratic, lazy and/or process oriented (eg big firms) and probably not a great place to work. But you probably already know this, hence the letter.

Soarez 13 years ago | |

Exactly. That is the point.

I am curious too, but I think this one will not reply. If he does, i'll make sure to come back with an update. ;)

mapster 13 years ago | | |

Are recruiters so loathed in the industry?

mforsberg 13 years ago |

When I got a lot of CV requests from recruiters I took a similar yet much more childish approach to your mail.

I created a PDF with my name, email and a link to my linkedin-profile. That way I could see if they had a look at my profile, most did and I actually got some good laughs and a couple of interviews with it.

jdduarte 13 years ago |

I think that's a great answer.

The CV approach is old and doesn't fit the the current market (for software engineer at least). You are what you do, and that is the most valuable thing a company should look for in new employees.

I hope the recruiter's mentality starts to change soon.

devb0x 13 years ago |

I don't see myself doing anything like this. Help them help you.

xauronx 13 years ago | |

Most recruiters don't want to help you. Helping you is just a by product of helping themselves. I had one that demanded a text document resume (instead of a PDF). A few days later he sends it back padded with a bunch of nonsense (including a lot of false skills).

dotborg 13 years ago |

LinkedIn profile instead of brain

beerglass 13 years ago |

Also, profile on Stackoverflow

batista 13 years ago |

Dear Applicant,

while I appreciate the originality of your response, I'm not particularly interested on following on this offer anymore for several reasons:

1) I don't like people forcing me to subscribe and check their profile on some third party site, no matter how prevalent it is. It's for the same reason why we don't force Facebook logins to all our visitors' throats and offer them the ability to create a new account with us instead.

2) I asked for one thing and you offered me another, plus your idea why it's not a good thing to ask for. While I appreciate your idea and counter-arguments, I also want people that work for me to do what the duck I've told them to do in the end. If you had included the LinkedIn link ALONG with a CV it would have been much better appreciated.

3) "If you need a document with my experience and education, feel free to use LinkedIn to export my profile to a PDF". Really? And if I asked you to setup a fault-tolerant PostgreSQL based datastore you would have told me to "feel free to open an AWS account, start several instances, install PostgreSQL on them and configure it"? We SURE started on the wrong foot here.

4) "A public github/codeplex/bitbucket (or any other kind of social coding platform) profile where one can look at an applicant's real work. We're talking real code on real projects."

I would n't go as far as to call your half-finished NodeJS/MongoDB tinkering and yet another mustache clone "real work on real projects".

5) "This rationale may only apply to Developers, Programmers and Software Engineers. But it is after all the field I'm interested in."

Sure, be I also hire for other 5,000 open positions in this company that are not "developers, programmers or software engineers" and I want a bloody CV document to put in my document management system alongside theirs.