Why "send us 50 CVs" is the worst brief you can give a recruiter.

I got a brief last month that asked for "as many CVs as possible by Friday." Same week, I got one from a different client that asked for three candidates I'd personally hire if it were my company. The first one took twenty hours of my week and ended in no placement. The second one took six hours and ended in an offer the following Tuesday.

The volume brief is the worst thing you can ask a recruiter for, and most clients don't realise they're asking for it.

Here's what happens when you tell an agency to send fifty CVs.

The economics of the agency change immediately. To produce fifty CVs in a week, the consultant has to spend less time on each one. So the screening gets shallower. The reference checks get skipped. The phone screen becomes a verification call instead of a fit conversation. The agency isn't being lazy — the math just doesn't allow anything else. You asked for volume and you got volume.

What you didn't get is a recruiter actually doing the job. The job of a recruiter — the actual one, not the one you're billed for — is to make hiring decisions faster and more accurate than the company could on its own. You can't do that on a per-CV basis. You can only do it by spending real time understanding the brief, calling people who don't apply on job boards, and screening the ones who are interested with enough rigour that the ones you send through are the ones the client should hire.

If you're paying for that work, fifty CVs means you're not getting it. The agency is moving the filtering job back to you and charging you for the move.

I had a conversation last week with a client who'd been burned by this twice. He told me he'd started asking agencies for fewer CVs as a discipline. His exact line: "If you can only send me three, you'll have done the work of figuring out which three." He's right. That brief produces better hires than the volume brief, faster, with less hiring-manager time burnt.

A small admission. The pushback I sometimes get on this is "what if you miss someone?" Fair question. Here's the honest answer. Yes, occasionally a recruiter screens out someone the client would have liked. But the volume-brief alternative is worse: the client now spends fifteen hours of their week reading CVs to find the same person who would have been in the top three anyway. The marginal cost of "missing one" is much lower than the marginal cost of "interviewing twenty bad fits to find one good one."

So if you're briefing an agency and the conversation starts with "send me as many CVs as you can," try this instead. "Send me three you'd hire yourself if it were your company. Tell me why you picked those three. If none of them work, we'll talk about what to change."

That's a brief. The other one is a request for sorting.

— Kern