Life is a little unfair these days. We all have been frustrated at the automated telephone answering service, or the call centre where they don't seem to speak the same language. When we submit our CV we can easily increase the chances that the recruiter will spend a few moments longer on our CV and in turn we will get the promise of an interview.

To achieve this let's do the math's first. For every hour a 30 second scan equals 60 CV's that's quite a few!. If the recruiter has researcher then they may spend up to a few minutes on your CV - so what has the researcher achieved. Typically the researcher is looking either for a series of buzzwords or specific companies. Sometimes recruitment companies have software that will do this for them and create a short list for analysis by a 'human'. Frightening yes but also realistic. If you have ever gone to view properties the minute you have seen 4 or 5 they all start to melt into each other. CV's are no different yet at 30 seconds or under that means at capacity over 6 hours equals 720 cv potentially to be viewed. Realistically recruiters will only view 20% of these as they have other duties to perform so in reality it's still a whopping 144 CV's per day!

Your CV is no different but we would suggest taking a closer look at what the recruiter might be looking for. If you are in software for instance the researcher might be looking for instances of specific software packages like Word or Paint or a programming language like Visual C++. They might look of recommendations Oracle 11 and Windows XP. They might also then look for the job title and company so it could be all of the technical requirements and the company something like: Oracle 11, Windows XP, Developer, Microsoft. If it is a computer that is screening then there will be an automatically prepared short list that the recruiter will look at.

This is where your CV must absolutely captivate, so you should make sure that it is easy to read, short, concise and representative of who you are and where you want to go. Sometimes a personal statement is enough for the recruiter to want to find out more and that's what you want because after 20 seconds of looking at your CV they move on. If they call you then you must convert them into allowing you to meet or to be interviewed by their client.

Spend time making sure your CV is representative and good enough to hold the attention of the recruiter - it will pay dividends.