How to write a CV for a recruitment consultant role

What a recruitment consultant hiring manager reads first

A recruitment manager hiring another recruiter reads a CV the way they'd read a candidate's CV they were about to submit to a client: fast, and looking for the numbers first. Before your job titles, before your sector experience, they want to know what you bill, against what target, and over what period. If that isn't on the page in the first third, most will assume you're hiding a weak figure, because in this trade that's usually what it means.

After the number, they're checking desk type. "Recruitment consultant" on its own tells them nothing. Were you 360 - doing your own business development, sourcing, interviewing and placing - or 180, working candidates against roles someone else won them? Perm desk, temp desk, or a split book? Contingency or retained? These aren't nuances. A hiring manager building a perm commercial desk will discount a candidate whose whole background is high-volume temp, and vice versa, unless the CV makes the crossover explicit and gives a reason for it.

Third thing they scan for: sector and specialism. "Commercial" recruitment covers office support, sales, marketing, HR, finance support, customer service - it's broad, and inside it people specialise. If your desk was office support and admin in a particular geography, say so. A vague "commercial recruitment" line reads as either genuinely generalist or as someone smoothing over a run of short stints in different specialisms, and the reader can't tell which from the word alone.

How billing is actually evidenced

The single biggest gap on recruitment CVs is billing figures given without context. "Consistently exceeded targets" says nothing a hiring manager can use. What they want is closer to: monthly or quarterly billing figure, the target it was measured against, and whether that was an individual number or a shared desk number. If you were part of a team, say what share was yours - a manager reading "desk billed £480k" with no individual breakdown will assume you're attaching yourself to someone else's year.

Where possible, show a trend rather than a single peak month. One exceptional quarter tells a hiring manager you can have a good month; a rising line over four quarters tells them you can build a desk. If billing dropped in a period, a one-line reason (parental leave, market conditions in that sector, a house move to a new patch) reads better than silence, because the silence gets filled in with something worse.

Other figures that carry weight in this field, roughly in order of how often hiring managers ask for them: CV-to-interview ratio, interview-to-offer ratio, average time to fill, number of live roles managed at once, and client retention - whether you were working repeat business from named accounts or cold desk-building from a standing start. If you held or grew a PSL (preferred supplier list) position with a client, or moved a client from contingency to retained terms, that is worth a specific line; it demonstrates account management, not just candidate sourcing, and it's a different skill that some desks need and others don't.

Be accurate about what you can name. Client confidentiality is taken seriously in this trade, and a CV that lists specific client names without qualification can read as a compliance risk to a hiring manager who has had to deal with a leaver naming clients they shouldn't. "Managed accounts across logistics and FMCG, including two FTSE 250 clients" is usually safer and just as informative as naming them outright, unless your contract or the client relationship explicitly allows it.

Qualifications, registrations and what they actually signal

There is no licence required to work as a recruitment consultant in the UK, and no qualification is a legal gate the way it is in some other fields. What exists instead is the Recruitment & Employment Confederation (REC) - membership of the REC by your employer, and individual accreditations like CertRP (Certificate in Recruitment Practice) or the REC's Level 3 and Level 6 qualifications in recruitment practice. These aren't universally expected, and plenty of strong billers have none of them, but on a CV they do two things: they signal you understand the regulatory side of the job, and for candidates moving between agencies they give a hiring manager a shared reference point when they can't otherwise verify training.

What's more relevant, and more often missing, is a demonstration that you understand the compliance framework the job sits inside: the Conduct of Employment Agencies and Employment Businesses Regulations 2003, and, if you've worked temp or contract desks, the Agency Workers Regulations (AWR) and how the 12-week qualifying period affects pay parity. If your role involved right-to-work checks, IR35 status determinations for contractors, or umbrella company arrangements, name it. These are exactly the details that separate someone who has run a compliant temp desk from someone who has only ever placed permanent candidates, and a hiring manager building or auditing a temp book will look for that line specifically.

The tools and vocabulary that signal you know the job

Name the CRM or applicant tracking system you've used - Bullhorn, Vincere, JobAdder, Mercury, Access Recruitment, Itris - and, if you've done it, say whether you built or configured workflows in it rather than just used it day to day. Recruitment CRMs vary enough between employers that naming the one you know saves a hiring manager an onboarding question, and its absence is noticeable to anyone reading a stack of these CVs, because everyone else includes it.

Same with sourcing and advertising tools: LinkedIn Recruiter, Broadbean, Idibu, job board licences (Reed, Totaljobs, CV-Library) if you held and managed them directly rather than just posted through someone else's account. If you ran your own multi-job-board advertising and managed the budget for it, that's a specific, evidenceable skill - say what the budget was and what response rates you saw, if you tracked them.

On vocabulary: use the terms the trade actually uses, and use them accurately, because a hiring manager who has done this job for years will notice if they're used loosely. "Warm desk" versus "cold desk-build" if you took over an existing book versus started one from nothing. "Rebate period" if you've had to manage the risk of a placement falling through inside the guarantee window. "Terms of business" if you negotiated your own client terms rather than working to a standard company template. None of this is jargon for its own sake - each phrase tells the reader something concrete about what you actually did, which is the whole point of the CV.

What candidates from this background routinely leave out

The most common omission is the one already mentioned: billing without context. Close behind it is desk type left implicit, so the reader has to guess whether you were full-cycle or delivery-only. Third is compliance knowledge - candidates who've been doing right-to-work checks and AWR calculations for years as a matter of routine don't think to write it down, because it's just the job to them, but to a hiring manager it's evidence you can be trusted with a temp book without close supervision.

A less obvious one: candidates leave off what happened to the desk after they left it, when it's good news. If you built a desk from nothing to a steady monthly figure and it was still running at that level when you handed it over, that's stronger evidence of sustainable work than a single strong month, and it's a line most CVs don't think to include.

And some leave off the plain fact of a market downturn affecting a sector they worked, when it's true and checkable. A hiring manager who recruits in commercial will usually know if a particular quarter was hard across the market. Naming it, briefly, alongside a dip in your own figures reads as competent self-awareness rather than an excuse - leaving it unexplained reads as either not noticing or hoping the reader won't.

What to do next

Go through your CV and put a real number, with its target and time period, on every role where you billed. Name your desk type - perm, temp, contract, 360 or 180 - on every line, not just the most recent one. Add the CRM and job board tools you've used by name. And write one line, per role, on the compliance side of the job you actually did: right-to-work, AWR, IR35, whatever applied. If you'd rather have that pulled together for you against the specific advert you're applying to, jobmarket.pro reads the advert in full and builds the CV from a profile of your actual experience, rather than a generic template with your job title dropped in.