Not in the Room: how hiring decisions are really made
The recruiter's side of the table, explained by someone who has sat there for more than eight years.
You send the CV. You do the interviews. Then a decision gets made in a room you never see, by people you may never meet.
This book takes you into that room. It shows who actually decides, what each of them is worried about, and why a strong candidate can lose to a weaker one. It's not another list of tips: it explains why things happen, so you can work out your own how.
The idea at the heart of it
Every claim you make, on your CV, in a message or in an interview, eventually meets someone who asks: how exactly, why that way, what would you change? I call this the follow-up test. The candidates who pass it aren't always the most experienced. They're the ones whose evidence still stands after the second and third question.
What's inside
Who really decides: recruiters, hiring managers, panels and the approvers you never meet, and why a role can vanish mid-process.
Being found: how recruiter searches actually work, and why the right people don't contact you.
The CV that gets the interview: what happens in the first seconds, and what a mid-to-senior CV has to prove.
The first conversation: what the hiring side is listening for, and how to state your salary range without pricing yourself out.
The final interviews: why strong candidates lose on trust, not skill.
Offers and counter-offers: how to negotiate without reopening the decision about you.
Rejection, decoded: what the email really means, and when pushing back works.
AI on both sides of the table: how to use it without it working against you.
If you contract: what changes when you're hired for a contract.
Plus: a "Before you move on" checklist after every chapter, a combined checklist, and message templates you can adapt in minutes.
Who is it for?
Mid-to-senior professionals, permanent or contract, who are good at their job and want to get better at the separate skill of getting hired. It's based on hiring in the UK and Europe, but the way decisions are made works much the same almost everywhere.
The details
64-page PDF
Short enough to read in one evening
Built to come back to at each stage of your search
Linked to a free online Toolkit page that's kept up to date
€5, about the price of the coffee we would drink while I explained all of this.
Read it tonight. Use it at your next application.