When a recruitment agency puts you forward, the hiring manager rarely sees the CV you sent. They see a document on the agency's letterhead, with a consultant's summary on top and some of your details missing. Knowing what a recruitment agency does to reformat a CV, and why, lets you catch the problems before they cost you an interview.
Why agencies rebuild your CV at all
Most agencies send every candidate in one house format. The agency CV template usually carries the firm's logo, a standard font, fixed section order and a footer with the consultant's name and number. From the client's side, this makes a shortlist of five people easy to compare. From the agency's side, it is branding: every page reminds the hiring manager who found these candidates.
There is also a commercial reason. If the client can read your email address and mobile number, nothing stops them from calling you directly and skipping the agency's fee. How those fees work, and what happens when several agencies hold your CV, are topics of their own, covered in Working With Multiple Recruiters: Rules and Etiquette. For this post, the point is simpler: the agency has a business interest in controlling what the client sees.
What usually changes before the client sees it
Some edits are routine and harmless. Others can quietly work against you. Here is what tends to happen between your inbox and the client's.
Contact details disappear
Your phone number, email, home address and LinkedIn URL are typically removed. Sometimes your surname goes too, leaving "Sarah K." at the top. This is standard practice and not a red flag in itself. It does mean the client cannot follow up with you, so every message, question and piece of feedback passes through one consultant.
A consultant's summary sits on top
Many agencies add a short cover note or a half-page profile written by the consultant. It might say you are "available on four weeks' notice, looking for 65k, strong in stakeholder management, interviewed well." This block is often the first thing the hiring manager reads, and sometimes the only thing they read closely. If the summary gets your notice period or salary expectations wrong, the conversation starts on a false footing.
Cuts and rewording
To fit the template, consultants trim. A two-page CV becomes a page and a half. Older roles collapse into a single line, bullet points get shortened, and your carefully chosen verbs get replaced by the consultant's habits. The result is not always worse, but it is no longer your voice.
Errors that were never yours
This is where things go wrong. When someone retypes or copy-pastes your CV into a new template, mistakes creep in:
- Dates shift, so a gap appears that you never had, or two jobs overlap.
- Two roles at the same employer get merged, hiding a promotion.
- A skill you listed as "working knowledge" turns into "expert".
- A job title gets "standardised" into something you never held.
Inflated skills are the most dangerous of these. Picture Tom, a data analyst who wrote "exposure to Python" on his CV. The version the agency sent said "advanced Python." In the interview, the hiring manager opened with a coding question Tom had no chance of answering well.
The anonymised version
Some clients ask agencies for fully anonymised profiles, with no name, photo, age or nationality. That overlaps with blind recruitment, which has its own rules and is covered in The Anonymous CV: What to Remove for Blind Recruitment. For agency submissions, an anonymised CV is usually just the standard reformat with a few extra fields stripped.
Ask to see the version that was sent
The simplest protection is also the one candidates use least. Before or right after the agency submits you, ask: "Could you send me the version that went to the client, so I can prepare for the interview?" Framed that way, it is a reasonable request, and most consultants will agree.
When you get it, read it as if you were the hiring manager. Check dates, titles, the order of roles, skill levels and anything the consultant wrote in the summary. Pay particular attention to numbers: team sizes, budgets, notice period, salary. A wrong figure in the summary can follow you into the offer stage.
If a consultant refuses to show you the document, that tells you something about how they work. You cannot force the issue, and in many countries data protection rules give you some right to see information held about you, but the details vary. Check the rules where you live before quoting them at anyone.
Make the agency's job easy
Agencies introduce errors partly because they work fast and the source file fights them. You can reduce the damage.
- Send an editable file. A clean Word document lets the consultant copy text straight into their template. A PDF exported from a design tool, with columns and text boxes, often turns into scrambled lines when pasted, and that is when dates and titles get mixed up.
- Keep the layout simple. One column, standard headings, dates in the same format on every line. The less the consultant has to interpret, the less they will guess.
- Spell out promotions. If you held two titles at one employer, give each its own line with its own dates. Do not rely on the consultant to keep them apart.
- Write your own short summary. Give the consultant three or four lines they can paste into their cover note. Many will use it, because it saves them time.
- Name the file clearly. "Firstname-Lastname-CV.docx" travels better through an agency's system than "final_v3_NEW.docx".
If you are also writing a cover letter for an agency-posted role, the same logic applies: give them something they can forward without rework. The Cover Letter for a Job Posted by a Recruitment Agency covers that side.
Correcting errors without souring the relationship
You will catch mistakes. How you raise them matters, because the consultant is still the person who speaks for you to the client.
Keep it factual and quick. Something like: "Thanks for sending this over. Two small fixes before the interview: my role at Northfield ran from 2019 to 2022, not 2018, and I would describe my Python as intermediate rather than advanced. Could you update the client's copy or let them know?" No blame, no long explanation, and a clear request.
If the CV has already been read by the client, ask the consultant to send a corrected version anyway. Hiring managers often print or forward CVs to the interview panel, and you want the right version in that room.
When the interviewer quotes a line you never wrote
Sometimes you only discover the problem in the interview. The hiring manager says, "I see you led a team of twelve," and you led a team of four.
Correct it calmly and move on. "That might have been lost in the agency's formatting. It was a team of four, and here is what we delivered." Do not criticise the agency in front of the client; it makes you look difficult and puts the consultant on the defensive. Afterwards, tell the consultant what came up so they can fix the file before the next round.
It also helps to bring your own copy of your CV to agency interviews. If a date or title comes into question, you can point to your version without making a scene.
Keep a master copy that is yours
The agency's file is their document, not yours. Keep your own master CV, dated and up to date, and use it as the reference every time an agency asks for your profile. If you build it from your LinkedIn profile with a tool like Postulit, update LinkedIn first so both sources match, then export a clean version for each agency.
Before you send your CV to your next recruitment agency, prepare two things: a single-column Word file, and a three-line summary in your own words, ready to be pasted on top.