The One Thing That Will Improve Your Job Search: Make the Recruiter's Life Easier

TL;DR There is one simple thing you can do to dramatically improve your odds of finding work: make the recruiter’s life easier. Details below. Cut out and keep.

Sitting in front of the screen, staring. Tokens gone. Now what? I do not have the heart to spend more money, and Claude informs me I have hours to kill until five o’clock, scratching my head until the good current flows again.

“So what do you do when the tokens run out,” I thought, and answered myself: “You write an article about running out of tokens!” So here we are. A keyboard, a screen, no Claude, no chat. Let us see whether I still remember the alphabet.

Why did it happen in the first place?

All I did was give it a few simple jobs to run overnight. Read some documents, draw conclusions, produce a report, write a bit of code, ship a release. Nothing that does not happen as a matter of routine.

And when I got into it and started investigating where it had all gone, something began to dawn on me. I gave that thing a genuinely terrible night.

1. The documents I handed over were in Hebrew, and scanned, and blurry. Even though I had them as clean running text in English. I was just slightly too lazy to go and find the file.
2. The goal I set was broad, so it spent its night trying to work out what I wanted from its life. Even though I knew exactly what I wanted.
3. The research: I sent it off to check everything with an army of agents, even though I already had the information sitting on my desk from a month ago.

In short, I raised its cognitive load to maximum for no reason at all, and that, ladies and gentlemen, has a price. Which you are now paying, incidentally, by reading the musings of my keyboard.

And then I asked myself: is this a price we pay in real life too?

Remember that life? The one we had back when we knew how to write an email on our own?

And then I remembered Itzik (real name withheld). Itzik is a lovely man, well known in the community, who very much wants to help absolutely everyone. The only trouble is that every week, bless him, I get piles of other people’s CVs from him, and assorted odd jobs, left, right and centre.

Itzik: Bro, sending you the CV of someone brilliant. Find her a job.

Itzik: Yael CV.doc

Me: It says “industrial engineering and management, background in QA, content and marketing developer, worked at a medical device company on the implementation team, bartender, and also studied psychology”?

Itzik: Exactly! Isn’t Yael a champion?! (real name withheld)

Me: But what is she actually looking for?

Itzik: Come on, why are you complicating it, bro?! You’re smart, think of something good and find her something. She’s a great girl, she was my freefall instructor at Habonim beach!

Me: What?

Itzik: What what?

Me: Never mind.

So I sat and thought and thought about how to help Yael, and what might be relevant for her. And then I remembered I had to drive to a meeting, and then to the school run, and Yael’s story faded and disappeared.

And now, with no Claude to help and tell me something clever about what I think I think, there is nothing left but to think for myself, and to say, and to shout: is this not a crying shame?

So many “tokens” burned in my own head trying to decode what Yael wants. What if she had simply told me? Or told Itzik? And if she is not going to tell anyone, then at the very least, built a CV that says it explicitly.

And then the penny dropped. The token, rather. We do this constantly, and it is not pretty, and it does damage. We send CV after CV to roles that are “a perfect fit for us”, and then get annoyed that nobody even bothers to come back to us.

One suggestion. Not a million. Not six. One.

Obviously I do not think there is a magic solution, because there is not one. I also do not think everything is within our control.

But I think I have something, because I want to offer one suggestion.

If you want to see a dramatic improvement in the process of searching (and finding!), and right now you have the attention and the energy and the appetite to optimise exactly one thing, what should that one thing be?

I think I have an answer for you.

Reduce the cognitive load on the recruiter.

Make her life easier. Have mercy on her, and on yourself.

You saw one open role? It feels tailor-made for you? Then write the CV so that the recruiter understands immediately that this is for you. Not later. Not roughly. Not “let them work it out for themselves”. No.

1. Who I am, briefly.
2. What I am looking for, and why this role is the answer.
3. How my experience along the way is ultra relevant to this role.
4. How “irrelevant” work experience either gets played down, or gets rewritten in the way that makes it most relevant to this role.
5. How this CV is a mirror of the job description. Same rhythm, same keywords.

Then run an experiment. Send the CV to a stranger and ask them, after thirty seconds of scanning: what do you understand? Who am I? What am I looking for?

Obviously you have to start by defining exactly what you want, and making sure this really is a role that fits you. But we have already spent plenty of words on that elsewhere.

Do it. Think about the recruiter. Make their life easier.

And along the way, you might learn something new about yourself, and you might just land the job you were after.

Happy hunting!