The first time you hire someone is a major watershed in your career. It is at this juncture that you really start to understand what is going on in the recruitment process. Up until that point, most people post or e-mail their application and have no clear idea what happens to it. Here's the inside gen ...

Recruiters use a process called Screening to identify possible good hires. Some companies use computers with OCR scanning to start this process, but most still rely on the human hand and eye ...

When your application lands on the desk of the Managing Director of a small company, the Human Resources Manager in a large company, or a recruitment consultant in a placement agency, he or she is going to do the following:

	Whizz through your Curriculum Vitae and cover letter to see if you remotely fit the requirements of the position. This is called the First Pass and it is at this point that upwards of 50% of all applications end up in the bin. Half.
	Some companies now use computers to complete the first pass - the software looks for key words. So an untargeted or poorly presented application (which doesn't scan well) may never be read by a human being ...
	Assuming your target company still relies on human beings, a competent hirer can get a taste for your experience, qualifications and abilities in 10-30 seconds. Remember - this is not an in-depth perusal of your CV, some poor unfortunate just has to plough through a large pile of documents and is quickly checking your fit against the pre-determined Minimum Entry Requirements.
	If you make it in any way difficult for her [let's say it's a her], she will not look kindly upon you. Chances are, she will not be looking at you at all - she will have binned you and moved on to the next application in the pile.
	If you survive the first pass, you are on the Possible pile. This is the (still quite large) bunch of CVs or applications which roughly fit the profile that the recruiter put in her advertisement.
	Then the fun really starts ....