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Create ResumeTotaljobs is one of the main UK job boards candidates use to find vacancies, upload a CV, set job alerts, and apply across different sectors. But the mistake many job seekers make is treating Totaljobs like a volume game: search, click, apply, repeat, hope. That is where good candidates quietly damage their own chances. In the UK job market, Totaljobs can be useful, but only when you understand how recruiters actually screen applications, how job adverts are written, and why some roles attract hundreds of unsuitable applicants within days. Used properly, Totaljobs can help you find relevant roles faster. Used badly, it becomes a digital black hole with better branding.
Totaljobs is a UK job search platform where candidates can search for vacancies, upload their CV, create job alerts, and apply for roles across many sectors. Employers and recruiters use it to advertise jobs, receive applications, and search candidate profiles through CV database tools.
That is the simple explanation.
The more useful explanation is this: Totaljobs sits in the middle of a hiring process that is often messier than candidates realise. A job advert on Totaljobs may be posted by:
A direct employer hiring for its own team
An internal talent acquisition team
A recruitment agency advertising on behalf of a client
A hiring company testing the market
A recruiter building a shortlist for current or future roles
A business that has not fully agreed internally what it wants yet
That last one is more common than candidates like to believe.
Yes, Totaljobs is worth using if you are applying for jobs in the UK, but it should not be your entire job search strategy. It works best when you use it for targeted searching, market research, salary awareness, job alert tracking, and recruiter visibility.
It works badly when you use it as a dumping ground for rushed applications.
In real hiring terms, Totaljobs is useful because it gives candidates access to a broad range of UK vacancies. It can help you spot which companies are hiring, which job titles are being used, what skills are repeatedly requested, and how salaries are being positioned. That information is valuable even before you apply.
But here is the part many candidates miss: job boards do not magically fix weak positioning. If your CV is unclear, too generic, poorly matched to the role, or full of duties without evidence, Totaljobs will simply help you send that weak positioning to more people at speed.
More applications do not automatically mean more interviews. Sometimes they just mean more rejections arriving in a tidy little email collection.
I would use Totaljobs as one part of a broader UK job search that also includes LinkedIn, company career pages, recruiter conversations, networking, sector specific job boards, and direct applications. For some sectors, Totaljobs can be very active. For others, especially niche senior roles, relationship based hiring and specialist recruiters may matter more.
A job advert can look very polished on the outside while the hiring process behind it is still unclear, delayed, budget dependent, or being argued over by three managers who all want slightly different versions of the same person. Glamorous, I know.
So when you use Totaljobs, you are not just interacting with a website. You are entering a recruitment workflow. Your CV may be screened by an applicant tracking system, reviewed by a recruiter, compared against other applicants, stored in a database, forwarded to a hiring manager, or ignored because the role changed after the advert went live.
That is why your approach matters.
When you apply through Totaljobs, your application usually enters a screening process. That process can vary depending on whether the advert was posted by an employer, recruitment agency, or hiring platform integration.
A typical flow looks like this:
You submit your CV and application
The recruiter or employer receives your details
Your CV may enter an applicant tracking system
Applications are filtered, sorted, or searched
A recruiter reviews suitable profiles
Shortlisted candidates are contacted
Selected CVs may be sent to the hiring manager
The hiring manager decides who progresses
The important part is that your CV is rarely read like a personal essay. It is scanned for relevance.
Recruiters and hiring managers are usually looking for fast answers:
Can this person do the job?
Have they done similar work before?
Are they at the right level?
Do they match the must have requirements?
Is the salary expectation likely to fit?
Are they based in a workable location or open to the right working pattern?
Does the CV make sense quickly?
Is there anything confusing, risky, or missing?
This is where many candidates misunderstand the process. They think a recruiter is reading their application with patience, curiosity, and a cup of tea. Sometimes, yes. More often, the recruiter is reviewing a large batch of applications while juggling hiring manager feedback, interview scheduling, salary conversations, rejected offers, and someone asking whether “hybrid” can mean five days in the office.
Your application has to make relevance obvious quickly.
When I review candidates from job boards, I am not looking for perfection. I am looking for alignment.
The first things recruiters usually notice are:
Your current or most recent job title
The industries or sectors you have worked in
Your key skills
Your level of responsibility
The companies you have worked for
Your location or commuting feasibility
Salary clues
Gaps, short roles, or unclear career moves
Whether your CV matches the job advert
Whether you look like a realistic candidate for the role
Candidates often obsess over design, fonts, and tiny formatting choices. Formatting matters, but only because it helps the reader understand your value quickly. A beautiful CV that does not answer the hiring question is still a weak CV.
The question behind every screening decision is simple: does this person look relevant enough to contact?
That does not mean you need to match every single requirement. It does mean the strongest evidence needs to be visible early. If the job advert asks for account management, stakeholder communication, CRM experience, and sales reporting, but your CV hides those details halfway down page two, you are making the recruiter work harder than they need to.
And in recruitment, making people work harder to understand you is rarely a winning strategy.
The biggest mistake candidates make on Totaljobs is searching too broadly. They type one generic job title, apply to whatever appears, and assume the platform is the problem when the results are poor.
A better search strategy is more deliberate.
Use Totaljobs to search by:
Specific job titles
Alternative job titles
Core skills
Sector terms
Location and realistic commute
Remote, hybrid, or office based preferences
Salary range
Contract type
Seniority level
For example, if you are looking for a marketing role, do not only search “marketing manager”. Depending on the company, similar roles may appear under:
Digital Marketing Manager
Marketing Executive
Campaign Manager
Brand Manager
Growth Marketing Manager
Communications Manager
Performance Marketing Manager
Content Marketing Manager
Job titles are not standardised across the UK market. One company’s “executive” is another company’s “manager”. One employer’s “coordinator” is secretly doing three people’s jobs and carrying the department on caffeine and quiet resentment.
You need to search around the role, not just for one title.
Also pay attention to wording in adverts. If the same skill appears repeatedly across several job adverts, that is not just keyword noise. It is market feedback. It tells you what employers currently value and what your CV may need to make clearer.
Most candidates read job adverts as a list of demands. Recruiters read them as clues.
A job advert usually contains three types of information:
What the employer definitely needs
What the employer would like
What the employer has included because someone copied it from an old job description
Your job is to work out which is which.
These are usually the non negotiables. They may include qualifications, legal right to work, specific technical skills, industry experience, language ability, certifications, location, or shift requirements.
If a role requires payroll experience and your CV shows none, that is a problem. If a finance role requires ACCA, CIMA, or ACA progression and you do not mention your qualification status, the recruiter may assume it is not there.
Do not make them guess.
These are useful but not always essential. Employers often list more than they truly expect because they are describing an ideal candidate, not necessarily a realistic one.
If you meet most of the core requirements but not every desirable item, you may still be worth applying. Many strong candidates talk themselves out of roles because they think the advert is a legal checklist. It usually is not. It is a wish list with formatting.
This is where candidates need to be careful.
When an advert says fast paced environment, it may mean:
The business is growing quickly
The workload is genuinely varied
The team is under resourced
Priorities change constantly
You will need to handle pressure without much hand holding
When an advert says wear many hats, it may mean:
The role has broad responsibility
The company needs flexibility
The job description is not fully defined
They may expect one person to cover too much
When an advert says competitive salary, it may mean:
The salary is genuinely benchmarked
The employer does not want to publish it
They are testing expectations
The budget may be lower than candidates hope
This does not mean you should avoid every advert with vague language. It means you should read it with your eyes open.
Uploading your CV to Totaljobs can help recruiters find you, especially if you are open to new roles in the UK market. But your CV needs to be searchable, clear, and aligned with the types of jobs you actually want.
A recruiter searching a CV database is not browsing casually. They are usually using keywords, job titles, skills, locations, salary indicators, and experience filters.
That means your CV needs to contain the language recruiters are likely to search for.
For example, if you want project coordinator roles, your CV should naturally include relevant terms such as:
Project coordination
Stakeholder communication
Project plans
Reporting
Risk and issue tracking
Budget support
Meeting coordination
Project administration
Microsoft Project or relevant tools
Agile or waterfall exposure where relevant
Do not keyword stuff. It looks desperate and reads badly. But do use the normal professional language of your target role.
The bigger issue is privacy and control. If you upload your CV, make sure you are comfortable with recruiters contacting you. Check your visibility settings where available, keep your contact details professional, and remove anything you do not want widely shared.
Also remember that recruiter attention is not always the same as good opportunity. Being contacted does not mean the role is right for you. Some recruiter messages will be relevant. Some will be wildly off. That is not personal. That is search logic meeting human laziness.
A recruiter friendly profile is not a profile packed with buzzwords. It is a profile that makes your target role obvious.
Your Totaljobs presence should answer:
What do you do?
What level are you at?
What sectors or functions do you understand?
What roles are you suitable for next?
What skills would make a recruiter contact you?
Where are you based or willing to work?
What working pattern are you realistically considering?
If you are open to several types of roles, you still need clarity. “Open to anything” rarely works well in recruitment because recruiters do not search for “anything”. They search for specific skills and job titles.
A good profile supports a clear direction. It does not need to be narrow, but it does need to make sense.
For example, a candidate looking for operations roles might position themselves around:
Operations coordination
Process improvement
Supplier management
Reporting
Team support
Administration
Customer operations
Workflow management
That creates a coherent picture. Compare that with a profile saying “hard working professional seeking a challenging role in a dynamic company”. That sentence has been haunting CVs since the beginning of time and still tells me nothing useful.
Most problems on job boards are not caused by the platform itself. They come from weak search behaviour, unclear positioning, and rushed applications.
This is the classic mistake. Candidates apply to everything because they want momentum. I understand the emotion behind it. Job searching is stressful, and clicking apply feels productive.
But irrelevant applications rarely create good outcomes. They can make you feel busier while producing fewer interviews.
Recruiters can tell when an application is random. If the job needs B2B sales experience and your CV is purely retail with no bridge, the application will probably be rejected quickly. That does not mean you are not capable. It means the evidence is not clear enough for that role.
A general CV is usually a weak CV.
You do not need to rewrite your entire CV for every application, but you should adjust the profile, key skills, and strongest achievements to match the role type. A CV for customer success should not read exactly the same as a CV for account management, even if there is overlap.
Recruiters are looking for relevance, not a full autobiography.
In the UK job market, salary and location still matter, even with hybrid work. If the role is in Manchester three days a week and you live in Kent with no relocation plan, the recruiter will question feasibility.
The same applies to salary. If your current or expected salary is far above the likely range, the recruiter may hesitate unless there is a strong reason to progress you.
That does not mean you should undersell yourself. It means you should be realistic about fit.
Many candidates apply after reading the job title only. This creates poor matches.
Always check:
Required experience
Contract type
Working pattern
Location
Salary or salary clues
Required qualifications
Sector expectations
Application instructions
Whether the role is agency advertised or direct employer advertised
A few minutes of reading can save you from a pointless application.
Dense paragraphs, unclear job titles, missing dates, vague responsibilities, unexplained gaps, and poor structure all slow down screening.
A recruiter should not need detective skills to understand your career. Save the mystery for crime dramas, not your CV.
A strong Totaljobs application is targeted, readable, and clearly matched to the role. It does not rely on the recruiter making generous assumptions.
Before applying, check whether your CV clearly shows:
Relevant job titles or transferable experience
Skills mentioned in the advert
Evidence of responsibilities at the right level
Achievements or outcomes where possible
Sector knowledge if required
Tools, systems, or qualifications requested
Location and working pattern fit
A career direction that makes sense
You want the recruiter to think, “Yes, I can see why this person applied.”
That sounds obvious, but many applications fail that basic test.
Weak Example:
“I am a motivated and enthusiastic professional with excellent communication skills and a passion for delivering results.”
Why this fails:
This tells the recruiter almost nothing. It could apply to a sales assistant, project manager, HR advisor, administrator, or someone applying to become Prime Minister. It is too generic to help screening.
Good Example:
“Customer service team leader with experience managing high volume customer queries, coaching frontline staff, handling escalations, and improving response times in a UK contact centre environment.”
Why this works:
It gives role level, function, environment, responsibilities, and context. A recruiter can immediately understand where the candidate may fit.
That is what good job board positioning does. It reduces confusion.
Candidates usually use Totaljobs to find jobs. Recruiters may use it to find candidates as well as manage applications.
That difference matters.
Recruiters may search by:
Job title
Current or previous employer
Skill keywords
Location
Salary range
Sector
Qualifications
Availability
Recently updated CVs
This means an active, updated, keyword relevant CV may be more visible than an old, vague one.
But recruiter search is imperfect. A strong candidate can be missed because their CV uses unusual wording. A less suitable candidate can appear because their CV contains the right keywords. This is why clear language matters.
Do not try to be overly creative with job titles. If your official title is unusual, add a clearer equivalent where appropriate. For example, if your company calls you a “Client Happiness Specialist” but the market calls it “Customer Success Executive”, make the connection obvious.
Recruiters do not have time to decode every company’s internal naming habits. Some job titles sound like they were created during a branding workshop nobody survived.
Totaljobs can be useful, but it should sit alongside other job search channels.
Job boards are good for visibility, volume, and market scanning. They show active vacancies and help you understand demand across sectors.
The downside is competition. Publicly advertised jobs often receive many applications, especially if they are remote, hybrid, entry level, or attached to a well known employer.
LinkedIn is better for networking, recruiter visibility, professional positioning, and passive opportunities. Totaljobs is often more direct and vacancy focused.
For many candidates, the best approach is to use both. Use Totaljobs to identify roles and market trends. Use LinkedIn to research hiring managers, follow companies, and strengthen your professional visibility.
Company career pages can be useful because some employers post roles there before or alongside job boards. Applying directly may sometimes give you a cleaner route into the employer’s system.
However, direct applications are not automatically better. A weak direct application is still weak. The channel helps, but relevance wins.
Recruitment agencies can be powerful when they specialise in your sector and understand your profile. A good recruiter can position you to the hiring manager, explain context, and give feedback that a job board never will.
A poor recruiter will send your CV into the void and call it “keeping you updated”. Choose carefully.
The best way to use Totaljobs is to build a repeatable search routine.
Set up targeted alerts, but do not rely on alerts alone. Algorithms are useful, not psychic. Review your searches manually as well.
A practical weekly routine could look like this:
Search your main target job titles
Search two or three alternative titles
Review newly posted roles first
Save relevant jobs before applying
Compare repeated skills across adverts
Adjust your CV for the strongest matches
Apply only where there is clear alignment
Track applications in a simple spreadsheet
Follow up where contact details are available and appropriate
Review which applications receive responses
The tracking part matters. Most candidates do not track properly, then they feel confused about what is working.
Track:
Job title
Company
Date applied
Source
Salary range
CV version used
Response received
Interview outcome
Notes
Patterns will appear. If you apply to twenty roles and receive no responses, your CV, targeting, or seniority match may need work. If you get first interviews but no second interviews, the problem may be interview performance, salary alignment, examples, or role fit.
Do not diagnose your job search emotionally when you can diagnose it practically.
Totaljobs may not be enough if you are targeting senior, niche, confidential, or highly specialised roles. Those opportunities are often filled through networks, headhunters, referrals, direct approaches, and specialist recruitment firms.
This is especially true for:
Senior leadership roles
Niche technical positions
Confidential replacement hires
Executive appointments
Specialist professional services roles
Roles in small markets where reputation matters
Highly competitive remote roles
If you are relying only on public adverts for these types of roles, you may be seeing only part of the market.
There is also the hidden job market issue. I do not like when people talk about the hidden job market as if it is some magical secret cave full of dream jobs. But there is truth behind the phrase. Some roles are discussed, shaped, referred, or recruited quietly before they ever become public adverts.
That does not mean job boards are useless. It means they are one channel, not the whole strategy.
Totaljobs can give you access. It cannot give you positioning.
It can show you vacancies. It cannot make your CV relevant.
It can increase visibility. It cannot replace judgement.
It can help recruiters find you. It cannot guarantee they contact you for the right roles.
That is the honest view.
The candidates who get the most from Totaljobs are not always the ones who apply the most. They are the ones who understand fit. They read adverts properly, use realistic search terms, keep their CV clear, and apply where the evidence makes sense.
The candidates who struggle often treat the job search like a numbers game with no strategy. They apply fast, use the same CV everywhere, ignore role requirements, and then assume the market is completely broken.
To be fair, parts of the hiring market are broken. There are slow processes, vague adverts, ghosting, unrealistic wish lists, hidden salary ranges, and job descriptions that appear to have been assembled from spare corporate parts.
But even in an imperfect system, your strategy still matters.
Before applying, ask yourself five practical questions.
Not in your head. On the page.
Candidates often say, “I can do that,” but the CV does not show it. Recruiters screen what is written, not what you meant to imply.
If you are too junior, you may not have enough evidence. If you are too senior, the employer may worry about salary, retention, or whether the role will challenge you.
Being overqualified is not always a compliment in hiring. Sometimes it translates to, “Will this person leave in three months?”
Hybrid roles still need practical commuting. If the location is awkward, address it clearly if you apply.
If no salary is listed, use clues such as job title, seniority, sector, location, and responsibilities. You can still apply, but be prepared to clarify expectations early.
Recruiters notice career logic. If your move looks unusual, explain the bridge through your CV profile or cover message if one is requested.
A good application makes the move understandable.
Before you apply through Totaljobs, check the following:
The job title matches your target direction
The core requirements are visible in your CV
Your most relevant experience appears early
Your CV includes the right keywords naturally
Your location and working pattern fit
Your salary expectations are realistic for the role
Your employment dates are clear
Your recent roles are easy to understand
Your achievements show impact, not just duties
You have removed irrelevant clutter
Your CV file name looks professional
Your contact details are correct
Your profile summary is specific to your target role
You are not applying purely because panic told you to
That last one is not a joke. Panic applications are real. They feel productive, but they often create poor results and more frustration.
A calmer, more targeted approach usually works better.
Totaljobs can be a useful part of a UK job search, especially if you use it strategically rather than mechanically. It gives you access to vacancies, recruiters, job alerts, and market information. But the platform is only as useful as the quality of your targeting and positioning.
The real advantage comes from understanding how hiring decisions are made. Recruiters are not looking for the most enthusiastic applicant. They are looking for the most relevant credible applicant they can confidently move forward.
That means your job is not to apply everywhere. Your job is to make your fit obvious where it genuinely exists.
Use Totaljobs to understand the market. Use it to find suitable roles. Use it to spot repeated employer requirements. Use it to test your CV positioning. But do not hand your job search over to any platform and hope it works magic.
Job boards can open doors. Your positioning decides whether anyone invites you through.
Written by Simar Malhi, a recruiter and headhunter with international recruitment experience. I write about CVs, job applications, hiring decisions, and the reality behind recruitment processes. My goal is to help candidates understand more honestly how employers, recruiters, and hiring managers actually select candidates.
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