Your CV from a recruiter’s perspective: Mathieu Ritter
Our ten carefully selected questions will help you understand how recruiters look at your CV. Scroll to the bottom for other interviews.
Who is Mathieu Ritter?
Mathieu is an experienced freelancer with 12 years of experience in design, product, tech & marketing recruitment and with 4-5 years in HR Consulting. In his career he has interviewed 10,000+ and hired 800+ candidates.
You can follow his company on LinkedIn or Instagram.
You can connect with Mathieu on LinkedIn or visit his website.
How much time do you typically spend reviewing a single CV?
1 minute.
What are the first three things you look for in a CV?
List of skills and the location to see if they are relevant for the role.
Achievements in recent working stations (with impact metrics) + University.
Good information architecture (content, visuals, text alignment) and if there are no grammar mistakes.
How important are formatting and visual appeal when reviewing a CV? What makes a CV easy or difficult to read?
Better stay simple visually but easy to go through, digest, to read.
What makes it hard to read is wrong fonts, bad alignment, overload of text, wrong spacing…
Easy to read is a clear structure with space.
What common mistakes do you see in CVs that immediately turn you off?
Grammatical mistakes in the 1st line of the candidate’s bio.
Wrong alignment & spacing; for designers, it’s game over.
How has technology (like Applicant Tracking Systems) changed the way you review CVs?
I’m not part of a big organisation but a freelancer. However, I’m familiar with the top 10 fonts that perform well with Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS): Calibri - Cambria - Georgia - Helvetica - Arial - Times New Roman - Garamond - Palatino - Tahoma - Verdana.
I also know that candidates need to list their full skill set using specific keywords. This is important because ATS searches often use keywords from the job description to filter applicants.
How much weight do you give to a candidate’s online presence (LinkedIn, GitHub, portfolio websites, etc.)?
It’s important, sure. A software engineer should share some code lines in GitHub, and designers should have a portfolio. I prefer a good static PDF portfolio or Figma landing page presentation (with micro animations) over a poorly designed portfolio website, just because people think they need a website.
If your LinkedIn is outdated and empty, it shows you’re not active within the community. It is not a killer criterion but also not a plus point.
How important is a cover letter in today’s job market? If a cover letter is included, what key elements should it contain?
Not many people read it. At events, I am still meeting heads of products who do. I’m always surprised to hear that, but, to be honest, it’s rare.
The classic structure should be:
- You (speak about the company)
- Me (speak about yourself)
- Us (speak about how you two can support each other and the value you’d be adding).
How do you view gaps in employment history?
I am fine with it and try to understand why. For example, did the candidate study again to upskill in a specific area or was it a career transition? Generally, if the candidate looks interesting, I ask for the reasons during an interview, but it is not THE blocker criteria if the candidate demonstrates strong hard skills and a good company track record.
That said, for some companies, especially in Germany, it can be an issue. In the US, this is less of a problem than in Western Europe.
I think it also depends on how many and how long those gaps are. A Product Designer who has not worked for the past 3 years might not be up to date with the latest tech design trends and best practices or new topics (accessibility, AI…).
What advice would you give to someone trying to stand out in today’s job market?
Network is a way to stand out and show who you are beyond just being one of the hundreds of resumes. It can eventually help you get to the first interview. It’s not only having solid application documents that gets you a job.
Tailor your application to the top 10-15 companies/jobs on your priority list. You can’t do it for every single one of your 100+ applications, but for those, you should.
Don’t only search on LinkedIn; try to find niche job boards and look at the career pages of the companies because not all of them pay expensive LinkedIn job Ads.
Are there some common misconceptions about CVs that you’d like to address?
Yes, the “I need to have it all on 1 page”, ending up with an overload for your reader.
It’s 2 to 3 pages; 2 is standard. If you’re a freelancer and have a lot of experience as a senior, then 3 can be ok, too, but never more than that.
If you lack space, skip the earliest less relevant experiences/work stations and focus on highlighting achievements of your super recent ones.
The wrong length is an entry-level/junior having a 3 to 4-page CV.
You can connect with Mathieu on LinkedIn or visit his website.
Read our previous interviews with Matthew, Amanda, Lucia, Andreea, Anastasiia or Insight: What do hiring managers look at in CVs?
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