So here's a statistic. Of the last five roles I've worked on, I haven't put forward a single male candidate. Not one. In fact, at one point, LinkedIn Recruiter was pushing me to make my talent pools more diverse by adding in more boys. Men. Either.

Sometimes, you get a really good candidate who has a bad CV. And by bad CV, I mean it's waffly, it's over-long, it's vague... and it's not because the candidate isn't trying. Not everyone can sell themselves with confidence. Not everyone is practiced in writing CVs.

Unless you're spectacularly unlucky, you won't find candidates putting their feet on the desk or belching loudly in an interview. You won't find them admitting to ACTUAL weaknesses when you ask them the famed question - what is your greatest weakness?

As Groucho Marx perhaps once said, I would never work for a company that would have me as an employee. I paraphrase a little, but it's an interesting thought. Do we hire people because they're like us? Do we hire people because we think they might 'align culturally'?

I can sort of understand why companies hire multiple recruiters to source for the same role. I'm guessing they see it like a treasure hunt. If you hire one person to find the treasure, you have a slim chance of finding it, but if you hire SEVEN people to find the treasure, you multiply your chances by seven, am I right? Am I right?

Everton's recruitment policy is among the very worst in the land. They wait for an employee to leave, and then they try (fail) to replace them before a deadline. The pain of not replacing those employees has resulted in Everton losing many matches, and you could argue it's going to cost the club many millions of pounds.

Our backgrounds give us a unique perspective. And it's often a perspective that prevents us from understanding how others may perceive things.

We have a tendency to focus on those transitional moments of our lives. Some of us even make companies out of those transitional moments.

As a marketing agency, you could be tempted to stick to hiring people directly from other agencies, but that does come with its own risks - I'll get to that, be patient - OR you could go scouring for people currently in in-house roles and convince them they should be agency-side. Again. Risks.

As a digital marketer, I've mostly used this in an analytics context. It takes me roughly 30 seconds inside someone's Google Analytics to know if there's a problem, and that's including the horrendous load time.

used to get speculative anonymous CVs ALL THE TIME at the digital agency. And you'd think - why are they sending me this CV? I don't need this person. OR you'd think OOH THAT WOULD BE NICE but it turns out not to be a real person. Nasty tactic.

If you're here, you're probably a digital marketer. I mean, if you're not, or you don't want to be one, you're probably a bit lost but you're welcome anyway.

I realised about ten years into my career that I wasn't actually very good at listening. Sure, I'd think I was listening, but not actively. I worked out there were two things preventing me from truly listening.

I used to work with someone who could never understand why I'd let candidates talk at the start of interviews. He wanted to keep firing questions at them from a list, drilling into the minutiae and ticking boxes off as he went. Each to their own, I guess.