Recruiter CV Examples & Writing Guide

This sample is for a recruiter with six years of experience who started as a recruitment consultant at an IT recruitment agency and moved in-house to a software company. The name, employers and figures are made up but sized to a real full-cycle recruiter's desk. Agency, healthcare and entry-level versions follow further down.

Recruiters read CVs for a living, so a recruiter's own CV is judged hard. The person hiring you (a TA manager, a director at an agency, or an HR director) wants the answers to four questions in the top half of page one.

• How much did you hire? Hires per year or quarter, live roles carried at once, and the level of roles (individual contributors, managers, executives). Agency: placements, fill rate and billings or net fee income (NFI), split by permanent and contract.
• What kinds of roles? Engineering, sales, healthcare (nurses, allied health professionals, doctors), corporate, hourly and high-volume, executive. A recruiter who filled 200 warehouse roles and one who filled 20 senior engineers are both good, but for different jobs.
• How did you find people? Direct sourcing (LinkedIn Recruiter, Boolean, GitHub, referrals) vs. inbound applicants vs. agencies. Direct sourcing skill is the thing in-house teams pay for.
• Which systems? The applicant tracking system (Greenhouse, Lever, Workday Recruiting, SmartRecruiters, Eploy, Tribepad, Teamtailor; Bullhorn, Vincere or Firefish for agencies), sourcing tools (LinkedIn Recruiter, Gem, SeekOut, hireEZ) and scheduling tools (GoodTime, Calendly). Switching an ATS costs weeks of ramp-up.

“Recruiters know exactly how CVs get screened, so there is no excuse for a vague one. Give me hires, live roles and time-to-fill for the last two years, the ATS you ran them in, and the hardest role you ever closed. If it is all 'partnered with stakeholders', the interview does not happen.”

Three to four lines: recruitment type and years, the roles you fill, your headline numbers, sourcing approach and tools. A personal statement beats a career objective at every level, including a first recruitment job.

The standard recruiter responsibilities (source candidates, screen, schedule, make offers) are the same on every CV. What separates yours is the count and the result. Eight rewrites using real recruitment metrics.

Keep 12 to 15 skills and use the exact tool names. TA leaders search their own ATS for terms like "Boolean", "Greenhouse" or "IR35", and the words need to be on your CV to match.

Recruitment skills:

• Full-cycle recruitment: intake, job advert, sourcing, screening, coordination, offer, close
• Direct sourcing: Boolean search, X-ray search, LinkedIn Recruiter projects, GitHub and Stack Overflow for engineers, talent mapping
• Competency-based and structured interviewing, scorecards, interviewer training
• Salary negotiation, offer approval workflows, counteroffer handling
• Pipeline metrics: time-to-fill, time-to-hire, funnel conversion, source of hire, offer acceptance, cost-per-hire, quality of hire
• High-volume or hourly recruitment (text campaigns, assessment days, same-day offers) if that is your background
• Executive search: research, confidential outreach, candidate reports, board-level references
• Agency skills: business development, taking job specs, fee and terms negotiation, contractor onboarding, margins and IR35 status checks

Tools (list the ones you have used, spelt as the vendor spells them):

• ATS: Greenhouse, Lever, Workday Recruiting, SmartRecruiters, Ashby, SAP SuccessFactors, Eploy, Tribepad, Teamtailor, Bullhorn (agency), Vincere (agency), Firefish (agency)
• Sourcing and CRM: LinkedIn Recruiter, Gem, SeekOut, hireEZ, CV-Library, Totaljobs, Reed, Indeed, ZoomInfo, Phenom, Beamery
• Assessment and interviewing: HireVue, Sova, Codility, HackerRank, CodeSignal, Criteria
• Scheduling and workflow: GoodTime, Calendly, ModernLoop, Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Slack
• Checks and onboarding: right-to-work checks (including digital checks through an identity service provider), DBS checks, background screening providers

Compliance knowledge worth a line if you have it: the Equality Act 2010 (no discriminatory adverts or interview questions), right-to-work checks, UK GDPR for candidate data, and for agency recruiters the Conduct of Employment Agencies and Employment Businesses Regulations 2003 (terms with candidates and clients, no fees charged to most work-seekers), the Agency Workers Regulations 2010 (equal treatment after 12 weeks in the same role) and the IR35 off-payroll rules for contractors. Sponsor licence and Skilled Worker visa basics help in technical and healthcare recruitment.

No licence is required to recruit in the UK, except for labour providers (gangmasters) in agriculture, horticulture, shellfish gathering and related food processing and packaging, who need a GLAA licence. Most recruiters come from HR, sales, business or psychology degrees, or from an unrelated first job. Qualifications are nice to have; the ones TA leaders and agency directors actually recognise are below. List them with the awarding body and year.

Agencies hire trainee recruitment consultants with no recruitment background all the time, because the job at the start is phone volume, persistence and organisation. In-house teams usually start people as recruitment coordinators, resourcers or sourcers. Your CV should show the raw materials: outreach volume, a sales or customer-facing record, scheduling and detail work, and comfort with LinkedIn and spreadsheets.

• Sales, retail, hospitality or call-centre jobs are the most transferable. Quantify them: calls a day, target attainment, customers served, upsell rate. Agency managers hire former sales staff on purpose.
• Any coordinator, scheduler or admin work: interviews scheduled, diaries managed, candidates or clients kept informed. Recruitment coordination is the most common entry route into in-house TA.
• Recruitment on the student side: running a society's membership drive, organising a careers fair, interviewing candidates for a student society committee.
• Show you already use the tools: a complete LinkedIn profile, Boolean searches you have practised, an Indeed or Totaljobs advert you managed for a small business, Excel or Google Sheets trackers.
• Name the specialism you want (technical, healthcare, agency) and read three adverts so your skills section uses their words.
• One page, and no typos anywhere. A recruiter who misspells a company name does not get the phone screen.

• One page is fine for juniors and up to about 5 years; two pages for senior, lead and TA manager roles with team and budget ownership. Never a third.
• Order: header, personal statement, a short key-metrics line or box (hires, live roles, time-to-fill, acceptance rate or NFI), experience, skills and tools, qualifications, education.
• Reverse chronological. TA leaders check tenure; agency stints of 12 to 18 months are normal, but explain a string of 6-month jobs in the cover letter or personal statement.
• Use a clean single-column template such as cvplex hr-modern. You know why: your own ATS strips graphics, tables and text boxes. No photo and no date of birth on a UK CV.
• Mirror the advert's words when true for you: full-cycle, 360 recruitment, sourcing, Boolean, ATS by name, hiring manager partnership, pipeline, offer negotiation, employer branding, diversity sourcing, high-volume, executive search.
• Match the specialism in the title line: "Technical Recruiter", "Healthcare Recruiter", "Recruitment Consultant", "Talent Acquisition Partner". Recruiters search titles first.
• Send a PDF named Firstname-Lastname-Recruiter-CV.pdf, and make sure your LinkedIn profile matches the dates and titles on it; the person hiring you will check.
• "Recruiter CV heat map" searches point to eye-tracking studies showing recruiters spend about 6 to 8 seconds on a first scan of the name, current title, dates and company names. Make those four elements bold and instantly readable on your own CV too.