Why Recruiters Don’t Call You for Job Interview?

By Ms. Urooj Iqbal

I am Chief Headhunting Officer with Ashraf Chaudhry Associates. Since December 2015, I have been intensely involved in recruitment activity for many multinationals and local blue-chip companies for a wide range of positions from entry level to heads of department. How do I work?

A client gives us a brief about profile of the position along with potential package clearly stating their preferences and biases as you may call. We advertise the position at our social media channels (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter) and we get a large number of CVs. My team downloads CVs and shares the folder with me for initial screening. Would you believe I select 20 CVs out of 200 in just 30 minutes? How much time per CV? Around 9 seconds!! I am neither unjust nor careless while rejecting 180 job seekers’ profiles. After doing this initial screening, I thoroughly read rest of the CVs to see relevance of profiles of candidates with job profile of my client. I reject 5 more CVs after thorough analysis. Now we contact 15 people for initial interview. Some don’t appear and some don’t click. We are left with 5 profiles that we forward to client for interview. My success ratio is almost 90%. People recommended by me and Mr. Ashraf Chaudhry have high rate of success with clients. For some senior positions, Mr. Ashraf Chaudhry personally coaches the candidates on attitude, protocols and dress codes.

You might be wondering what do I look for in the CVs while doing initial screening. I and all other recruiters and headhunters follow the same practice. Recruiters throw CVs in recycle bin because of the following reasons.

  1. Your CV is not focused. It is full of irrelevant stuff and recruiter has to struggle to find out what you stand for. You make a hotchpotch of sales, marketing, event management and brand activation or cost accounting, financial engineering, taxation and corporate finance. You just press the send button without looking for key words in the job advertisement
  2. There are typo errors and grammatical mistakes. One of our clients stopped giving us recruitment business when we forwarded them a CV that had spelling mistakes. We learnt it the hard way. Your CV has one serious typo error, you are out of game.
  3. Your CV does not carry powerful words. Recruiters look for professional jargon.
  4. Your CV does not tell anything in a compelling way as to why you should be hired.
  5. Your CV lacks visual appeal. Recruiters can overlook the cosmetic side of your CV if content side is heavy.

Is your CV worthy of being shortlisted? Just e-mail me your CV and my team will analyze it. Professional analysis is 100% free. Send your CV at [email protected]

My Brief Introduction: I am a Telecom Engineer and an MBA with majors in Human Resources from IoBM, Karachi. I work closely with my clients to provide them best human resource. I am passionate learner and open net-worker. You can join me at LinkedIn.

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