I contacted someone at a well known large firm back at the start of May last year about a role. Filled out loads of forms online. Heard nothing.

Yesterday I got an email inviting me to arrange an interview, wondering if I'd still be available, and asking me for my salary expectations.

Sometimes you wonder how these firms work at all.

For those looking, my experience is that virtually all aggregator sites like efinancial and LinkedIn are black holes for applications. Just find the person who put up the advert and contact them directly. You can often see how many applicants there are and from there you can extrapolate how much time there really is to look at CVs. It's not good, but also it's impossible for all the CVs to be relevant. I've been on the hiring side myself and I can tell you there's a heck of a lot of people who apply for jobs they can't get.

People say a lot of things about third party recruiters but I keep in touch with a good few of them. They have certain benefits, mainly that you can straight up ask them about salary and they know a lot of firms who don't advertise.