What Gets You on the Yes Pile | EVPeasy #10

Post a role in Dubai and Vicki Parker will get more than 200 applications. She reads every one, in the evening, personally.

Vicki is VP of Talent Acquisition at Vistra, a corporate services firm with over 10,000 employees across more than 50 jurisdictions. Speaking on episode 10 of EVPeasy, she made the case that screening still needs a human at the other end, and that technology can help you decide what to look at first but should not decide what you never see.

Which puts the responsibility back on the application itself. Her advice, in her own terms:

Read the advert. A large share of applications she sees simply lack the technical qualifications listed. For accountants, tax specialists and legal professionals, that is not something a good covering letter recovers from.

Show impact, not duties. Listing what you were responsible for tells her nothing. Listing what changed because you were there is what moves a CV onto the yes pile. Make it commercial.

Tailor the opening paragraph. It is the part she reads first and the part most people leave untouched between applications.

Personality counts at interview. Vistra is fast, flat and thinly spread, so she is looking for people who will roll their sleeves up, not only people who can do the work on paper.

Her broader point is one candidates rarely hear from the hiring side. Vistra, she says, is not for everybody. She would rather tell you a role is wrong for you than place you in it and watch it fail, a habit she traces back to six years spent making people redundant before she moved into recruitment.

Worth remembering next time you are tempted to fire off fifty applications in an evening. Someone is reading them.