We don't care much about your CV. Here's what we actually look at.

A headhunter's confession: we read hundreds of résumés every month, and it's almost never the résumé that decides who moves forward.

Not because CVs are useless. They serve one precise purpose: getting past the first thirty seconds. Everything that matters happens afterwards. Yet most technical candidates spend hours fine-tuning the layout and zero minutes preparing what will actually get them picked, or passed over.

Here's what we really look at, in the order we look at it.

1. The trajectory, not the stops

A list of companies and job titles tells us where you've been. It doesn't tell us where you're going, and that's what interests us and the companies we search for.

Two engineers with the exact same path, five years at a components company, then three at an OEM, can tell two opposite stories. One moved because they were chasing a specific goal: they wanted to go from designing a single component to system integration. The other moved because they'd "had enough". The first has a trajectory. The second just has a list.

The question we always ask, in one form or another, is: why this move? If every job change has an answer that's about the skills you were after, and not just salary or fatigue, you're already in the top quartile.

2. The projects, not the job descriptions

"Head of mechanical design" means nothing. The same title covers someone who designed a bracket and someone who took an epicyclic gearbox into production from a blank sheet.

What we want to hear is the project: what was the problem, what constraints did you have, what did you decide, personally, not your team, and what happened next. An engineer who can tell three projects at this level of detail is worth more than ten pages of job descriptions.

A test we use often: we ask what was the most expensive technical mistake you contributed to. Someone who answers "I can't think of anything" worries us far more than someone who describes a disaster. Whoever has done, has erred. Whoever erred and understood why, has grown.

3. The questions you ask

At a certain point in the interview the roles reverse, and that's the phase that weighs more than candidates imagine.

Someone who asks nothing, or only about holidays and remote work, tells us they're looking for a job. Fair enough, but the companies we serve are looking for people who want that job. Someone who instead asks how the engineering department is structured, who will make the decisions on the project, why the position is open, what software the team uses and why, they're already working. It shows.

4. The technical language, actually spoken

On the CV everyone writes the full list: CATIA, ANSYS, Siemens PLC, Python. In conversation, the difference between someone who has used a tool for six years and someone who saw it on a course emerges in three questions. There's no point bluffing, and above all no point inflating: we prefer a candidate who says "I've never done this, but I've done something similar" to one who claims everything and holds up to nothing. In a search, trust is the one currency you can't renegotiate.

So what about the CV?

Keep it simple. One page, two at most. Projects before job descriptions, numbers where they exist (tolerances, volumes, budgets, timelines), no sentences about leadership and passion: those are demonstrated, not declared. Then stop polishing it and prepare the rest, because it's on the rest that you'll win or lose.

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Labora Partners is a headhunting and staffing boutique specialised in technical and engineering profiles, with offices in Milan and Eindhoven. If you recognise yourself in this way of assessing people, take a look at our open positions or get in touch.