Overview
Recruitment agencies hire graduates in large numbers, but they are looking for a very specific type of person. They want someone who is competitive, comfortable on the phone, and able to handle rejection without slowing down. Your resume needs to demonstrate those qualities through concrete examples, not just personality descriptions.
This resume belongs to Emma Richardson, a business management graduate from Leeds Beckett University. She worked part time in retail during university and ran the university's careers fair as president of the Business Society. Her resume works because it highlights the transferable skills that matter most in recruitment: sales, communication, organisation, and persistence.
What Makes This Resume Work
Retail experience is reframed for recruitment. Emma worked at a mobile phone shop where she consistently met monthly sales targets. She averaged 18 handset sales per month against a target of 15, placing her in the top three performers in her branch. Recruitment is fundamentally a sales role, and this track record immediately tells an employer she can close.
The careers fair project shows organisational ability. As Business Society president, she organised a careers fair with 22 employer exhibitors and over 300 student attendees. She handled outreach emails to companies, booked the venue, coordinated volunteers, and managed the event on the day. That is project management experience delivered in a high pressure, deadline driven environment. Exactly what recruitment demands.
Communication skills are demonstrated, not claimed. Instead of writing "excellent communicator," Emma mentions that she conducted 15 phone calls per day to confirm employer attendance at the careers fair and followed up with personalised thank you emails to all exhibitors. In recruitment, phone confidence and follow up discipline are everything. These examples prove she has both.
Her degree is relevant but not the focus. She lists her Business Management degree and highlights modules in Human Resource Management and Organisational Behaviour. These are useful for understanding the recruitment industry, but she wisely lets her practical experience take centre stage.
Key Takeaways
If you have any sales experience, make it the star of your resume. Hit a target? Beat a target? Upsold a product? Those results translate directly to recruitment consulting and should be quantified clearly.
Show that you can organise things and follow through. Events, projects, society activities. Anything where you had to coordinate multiple people and hit a deadline counts.
Demonstrate phone and email confidence with examples, not adjectives. Recruitment consultants spend most of their day on calls and writing messages. Evidence of doing this already puts you ahead of candidates who only claim to be "great communicators."
