James spent eight years as a technical recruiter inside a FTSE 100 engineering firm before joining RealtimeCV, where he now focuses almost entirely on CVs for software engineers, data professionals, and IT leaders. He has sat on the other side of the hiring process long enough to know exactly what makes an applicant tracking system flag a CV for review rather than quietly filing it away, and what makes a hiring manager actually stop scrolling once a human finally sees it.
A lot of his work is translation. Engineers are often brilliant at the work itself and much less comfortable describing it in a way that lands with someone outside their team, so James spends a good chunk of every project turning system migrations, pipeline builds, and architecture decisions into outcomes that a non-technical hiring manager can still recognise as valuable. At the same time, he keeps the technical detail and keyword density that recruiters and ATS parsers are actually scanning for, because losing that would defeat the point.
He is also fairly blunt about common mistakes. Long lists of programming languages with no context, vague claims about "improving performance," and CVs that read like a copy-pasted LinkedIn summary are the three things he flags most often. Instead he pushes clients to think in terms of scale and consequence, how many users were affected, how much faster something ran afterwards, what broke before and stopped breaking after.
James still keeps half an eye on the industries he used to recruit for, mostly because a handful of former colleagues still send him CVs to look over informally. He is currently based in Leeds, works mainly with clients in tech and data roles across the UK, and says the part of the job he enjoys most is the moment a client tells him they finally got a call back after months of silence.