I've had several recruiters take my LinkedIn profile as a basis, and send the company something based off that. All the best interviews in the last year were of

I've had several recruiters take my LinkedIn profile as a basis, and send the company something based off that. All the best interviews in the last year were off my LinkedIn profile, and that's how I got my current role. I'm grateful to those recruiters - that was really helpful. One of them told me they have a team who will sort that out if there's good information in the LinkedIn profile already. It also helped with a mental block, because it is so hard to cut down decades of diverse experience into a couple of pages that somehow encapsulate it. A good recruiter knows what the company wants to see better than I do, and if something is genuinely part of my skills and experience that I wouldn't have thought to include, that's really helpful. I don't know why but I found things pretty difficult mentally last year. Those recruiters who were able to hook me up with a company with less ritual proved to be catalytic. If a cold-messaging recruiter asks me for a CV now, I apologise for not having an up to date one and tell them they are welcome to use my LinkedIn profile. If they continue needing a CV, the process stalls. I feel I should have something ready, but during times where I was seriously looking for a role, I ended up with my attention taken up with calls, interviews and offers from other companies before I got around to writing up a targeted CV, so ended up not writing one. Perhaps it's just luck but that's how it turned out the last couple of years. Similarly, companies that took "as little as a month!" to interview were eclipsed by those who took less than a week to make a good offer worth considering. Good recruiters have been catalytic in getting those offers quickly, as well as negotiating on my behalf (taking into account my input, not blindly). So I am grateful to the good ones. They are facilitators.