Field notes for better candidate hand-offs

All guides

• We Compared Every CV Formatting Tool. Here Are the Prices They'd Rather You Calculated Yourself — A fully sourced 2026 comparison of CV formatting software for recruitment agencies — HireAra, Allsorter, Candidately, CVFormatter, FormaCV, RefineCV and ConnectIQ. Every price read from the vendor's own page, every per-CV cost shown, including where competitors beat us.
• CV Formatting Software for Recruitment Agencies: How to Choose (2026) — A practical buying guide for recruitment agencies comparing CV formatting software in 2026: the capabilities that matter, the pricing models to understand, and the questions to ask before you commit.
• How Recruitment Agencies Present Candidates to Clients: The Complete Workflow — The full candidate presentation workflow for recruitment agencies: intake and verification, the branded submission pack, anonymisation, format choice and the hand-off — with checklists you can adopt.
• How to Format a Candidate CV for Client Submission — A step-by-step process for turning a candidate's own CV into a branded client submission: what to restructure, what to leave alone, and the checks to run before it leaves your agency.
• The Recruitment Agency CV Template Checklist — What a branded candidate CV template needs to survive client hand-off and ATS parsing: structure, typography, branding placement and the design choices that quietly cost you placements.
• Blind CV Anonymisation for Recruiters: What It Removes, and What It Misses — A practical guide to anonymising candidate CVs for client submission: which identifiers matter, where automated redaction reliably fails, and how to check a document before it leaves your agency.
• PDF vs DOCX for Candidate CV Submissions: A Recruiter's Guide — When to send a candidate CV as PDF and when the client needs Word, how each format survives ATS parsing, and why the file type argument usually hides a different problem.
• Cutting CV Formatting Time in a Recruitment Agency: Where the Hours Actually Go — Measured timings for manual versus automated candidate CV formatting, how to calculate what reformatting costs your agency, and which parts of the workflow automation genuinely removes.
• AI CV Rewriting Without Inventing Facts: How to Test the Claim — Every CV formatting vendor says its AI will not invent facts. This is what that promise has to mean technically, how the failures actually look, and the questions to ask before you trust one with a client submission.
• GDPR and Candidate CVs: What Recruitment Agencies Need to Get Right — How UK GDPR applies to candidate CVs in a recruitment agency: lawful basis, data minimisation in client submissions, retention, and the questions to ask any CV formatting tool that processes candidate data.
• Bulk CV Formatting: Getting a Whole Shortlist to a Client at Once — How to format an entire candidate shortlist in one pass, what parallel processing actually does to turnaround time, and why batch submissions change the shape of a recruiter's day.
• Recreating Your Agency's Existing CV Template in a Formatting Tool — How to reproduce a branded Word or PDF candidate CV template in a formatting tool: which design details matter, which quietly break, and how to check the result before rolling it out.
• What AI Gets Wrong When Rewriting a CV: Six Worked Examples — Real before-and-after examples of AI CV rewriting failures — invented figures, misattributed budgets, upgraded scope words and phantom employers — and the check that catches each one.
• 10 CV Mistakes That Cost You the Interview — and How to Check for Each One — Ten specific, checkable CV mistakes, each with the test that tells you whether yours has it. No vague advice, no invented statistics.
• What an ATS Actually Reads From Your CV — 7 Things It Takes and 4 It Silently Drops — Applicant tracking systems parse your CV into fields. Here is what survives that process, what disappears without warning, and how to see it for your own document.
• The 5 CV Formats That Actually Work — and Exactly Who Each One Suits — Reverse-chronological, functional, hybrid, academic and one-page. What each format is genuinely for, when it backfires, and how to pick.
• 6 Ways AI Ruins a CV — and How to Use It Without Getting Caught — AI rewriting fails in specific, recognisable ways. Here are the six, why each one is dangerous at interview, and how to keep the benefit without the risk.
• 10 CV Tips From the People Who Actually Read Them All Day — What recruitment consultants notice, reformat and quietly fix before sending a CV to their client — and what that tells you about your own.
• ConnectIQ vs HireAra: What £180 a Month Buys, and Where HireAra Is Genuinely Ahead — A sourced comparison of ConnectIQ and HireAra for recruitment agencies — every price read from HireAra's own pricing page on 29 August 2026, the per-CV cost worked out at each tier, and an honest list of the things HireAra does that we do not.
• ConnectIQ vs Allsorter: One of Us Publishes a Price — An honest comparison of ConnectIQ and Allsorter for recruitment agencies. Allsorter's pricing page publishes no figure and requires a quote, so this page compares what can actually be verified — and says plainly where Allsorter is the stronger choice.
• Every CV Tool Says Its AI Won't Invent Facts. Here Are Seven Tests That Find Out — Agency-side guide to testing whether a CV formatting vendor's no-fabrication claim survives contact with a real CV — seven concrete tests, what a good answer looks like, and the questions that separate a checked guarantee from a well-written prompt.