The curse of the random applicant

The New Year candidate surge has materialized. Morgan McKinley's latest research reveals a 50% surge in City jobseekers between December and January.

For recruiters, the rush of candidates is both a blessing and a curse. On one hand, strong applicants who were loathe to move jobs during 2008 and 2009 are coming back to the market. On the other, random applications are coming in thick and fast.

"The reality is that around 95% of people who respond to adverts haven't read them properly or are simply hoping that the hiring manager will have a change of heart and recruit someone who has no connection to the role whatsoever," says the director of one recruitment firm.

"These people don't realise that banks are only paying us to find what they can't get themselves," he adds. "We are not being paid to present our clients with people who bear no resemblance to the spec."

Despite the popularity of CV 'parsing' software which allows recruiters to sift through CVs electronically using key words, all the recruiters we spoke to said they favour the human touch.

"At Robert Walters, every CV is sent to a consultant and that consultant will go through it," says Oliver Harris, a director at Robert Walters. Otherwise, he says, "it's possible to miss great candidates who just haven't included the right wording in their CV."

The result, however, is that some recruiters are sifting through 100s of CVs a day - and don't look kindly on applicants who are totally irrelevant.

"What a recruiter wants is someone who fits their exact job spec," says Peter Harrison of banking careers advisors Harrison Careers. "If they're advertising for someone with credit derivatives experience who speaks French and has worked in a major bank, that's what they need."

If your CV doesn't precisely fit the spec, Harrison says your best chance of success may be to send it in anyway in the hope that something more appropriate will turn up in the weeks to come.

However, Harrison advises that the only way recruiters will really take notice of this kind of application is if you build a relationship with them: "Call every three weeks to remind them about you. Recruiters are often reactive rather than proactive and will tend to focus only on the vacancies they've got at the time."