Sponsor lists are not the whole picture
Every company on the UK Sponsor List can hire you on a Skilled Worker visa, but the list is large and noisy. The real signal is whether a company has hired internationally in the last 12 months and whether they list sponsorship available on the JD.
Pay bands are tight and public
UK senior tech roles cluster around £85-130k base with limited equity, except for late-stage scale-ups. Levels.fyi and Otta are more accurate than recruiter quotes.
Recruiters read CVs, not LinkedIn
For most UK roles, the recruiter spends 20 to 30 seconds on your CV before deciding. The first 8 lines do the heavy lifting: headline, summary, top role bullets. Anything that wraps to a third line in the headline gets ignored.
Cover letters still matter for the senior end
For Senior PM, EM and above, a tight, evidence-led cover letter raises reply rates measurably. For mid-level IC roles, it is mostly optional and recruiters skip it.