One interesting facet of my working life so far is I've never gotten a job through the traditional recruitment process. This isn't to say I've got a legion of failed interviews behind me, it's actually in recognition that I've got all my roles so far through personal recommendation or connections. Straight in. No interview. Well, okay, on one occasion there may have been a polite chat just to make sure I wasn't someone annoying. One might suggest this is a good thing, and it is, but it does have one major foible: you're exposure to the recruitment process is minimal. This means you're not prepared for it.

What I have discovered is there is two streams of recruitment, and they are highly varied. The two streams are those involving recruitment consultants and applying direct.

Let's look at the process involving recruitment consultants first. Do they actually do anything? Really? I may be wrong, and I'm sure there are some out their who are fantastic at their job, and I realise what they do is a bit of a black box (only potentially empty), but I'm not sure they do much for the candidate beyond being the interface employers now put between themselves and the candidate. I understand why employers do it, as it provides what is hopefully a focused filtering, but I'm not sure about the employee. It creates psychic distance between me and the person who will potential employ me and I'm not fully sold on the idea that the recruitment consultant actively sells me to minimise that psychic distance either. In a lot of cases the role gets described in very general terms, you certainly don't get a detailed specification or a chance to reply to a detail specification. The CV just gets submitted and you await the result with fingers crossed, especially since you've probably not had the chance to tailor the CV as accurately as you would like (lack of a specification again).

This puts a lot of weight on the CV and CV writing is probably one of the most complex, difficult and refined arts in the career world. Either that or it's the biggest con job going. I'm sure there are people of both views. The biggest problem comes down to the fight between scope and focus. You want to ensure your CV captures the scope of your experience, but in turn doesn't lack focus thus forcing the potential employer to have to dig around for the pertinent facts. I was making this mistake. I'm not sure you permanently solve it, though you can come closer to solving it in targeting your CV for specific roles (that problem with recruitment consultants again). When your experience is quite vast and broad, you have to target it.

That's one process, the other process involves direct applications. This is a different process and is much better organised with respect to the candidate. In the first instance you almost always get a detailed job specification and a detailed person specification for the person they have in mind. This allows you to select your skills and achievements specifically for the role. It's very targeted. Invariably you have to fill in an application form which provides the medium for your targeted application. What is even more surprising is it seems more and more direct applications don't even want to see the CV, they just want the application form which should show the sort of things you'd put on the CV but without any padding. It's not surprising that I do much better at direct applications as you actually get to apply for the job rather than just send a CV through that is a best guess at focusing on the right skills.

These two streams of recruitment are also starting to grow apart in the number of jobs available. Historically, I've not found much use in looking for jobs at the Job Centre and in local papers. All the good jobs have been with recruitment consultants, much to my chagrin. Now it's changing, I'm finding more jobs by looking at the Job Centre website, the on-line presence of local newspapers and specific public sector recruitment sites. That last one is the key one, as it would seem the only people employing are in the public sector. This is fine, it also has the advantage that they always want people to apply directly.