How to Stand Out When There Are More Salespeople Than Sales Jobs

A good AE messaged me last month. Six years' experience, consistent quota attainment, references that would make you sit up. He had applied to more than forty roles in eight weeks and heard almost nothing back. His question was the one I hear most often at the moment: is it me, or is it the market?

It was the market. Mostly. But not in the way he thought.

The market really has shifted — but not against good people

Candidate availability across the UK has been rising for months. Redundancies, fewer new roles, and understandable nervousness about job security have all pushed more people back onto the market at once. On the roles we recruit for, applications per search are up somewhere between a quarter and a third on this time last year.

So yes — there are more of you, chasing fewer openings. That is real, and it is why the same CV that got three replies eighteen months ago now gets none.

But here is the part that matters. More applicants does not mean more qualified applicants. It means more noise. The bar to get noticed has gone up; the bar to be genuinely good has not moved. If you are good, the job is not to shout louder. It is to be unmissable to the handful of people actually reading.

Applying to more roles is the wrong instinct

When nothing lands, the natural response is to apply to more. Forty becomes eighty. It almost never works, because the problem was rarely volume — it was that each application asked the reader to do the work of joining the dots.

A recruiter or hiring manager scanning a stack of CVs is not trying to find reasons to say yes. They are trying to get to a shortlist quickly, which means they are looking for reasons to say no. A generic CV, fired at everything, hands them one every time.

Ten applications where your CV visibly matches the role will beat eighty where it does not. Every time.

Make your CV speak the language of the specific role

The single highest-leverage thing you can do is tailor your CV to each job you apply for. Not a full rewrite — a reframe. Lead with the experience that matters most for this role. Use the words the job ad uses. Put your best, most relevant number in the first third of the page, where the six-second scan actually lands.

This is also what gets you past the software. A large share of CVs are filtered by an applicant tracking system before a person ever sees them, and those systems match on the language of the role. If the ad says “new business” and your CV says “business development”, you can lose before you have started.

Use recruiters properly — as a route, not a lottery

Do not blast your CV to twenty agencies and wait. Pick a small number who genuinely work your market, tell them specifically what you want and what you will not take, and give them something to sell — your numbers, your patch, your reason for moving. A recruiter who knows exactly what good looks like for you is worth more than another thirty applications into the void.

It is worth saying why that relationship compounds. More than seven in ten of our own placements are at clients we have placed with more than once. Recruiters who know a market are not starting from scratch each time — and that is exactly the shortcut you want working for you, not against you.

Prepare like the interview is the job

Getting shortlisted is half of it. In a crowded market the interview is where the decision is actually made, and the person who has clearly prepared beats the more experienced person who winged it more often than you would think. Know their business. Have your stories ready with the numbers attached. Turn up with sharp questions of your own.

The market is harder than it was. It is not closed. The people getting hired right now are not applying to more roles — they are applying to fewer, better, and turning up impossible to ignore.

Written by Ian Harwood. Sales Recruitment Agency is a trading brand of H2 International Ltd (11968625).