Why You Should Probably, Almost Definitely Get Rid of CVs (and what to use instead)

Can your organisation overcome a 540-something-year-old habit?

Accidentally invented by Leonardo Da Vinci, who penned the first ever CV in 1482 as part of an appeal to the Duke of Milan for a job as a military engineer, CVs are now a de facto part of modern recruitment practices and generally viewed as the key entry point for getting one’s foot in the door. Despite this, more and more organisations are starting to do away with using CVs in their selection process. So why disrupt a 500-year plus tradition and get rid of CVs now?  

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Short on time? Here’s the gist of it:  

Having been used for over 500 years, CVs are generally considered a staple in most recruitment and selection processes. But how can something which is so reliant on subjective judgement and has little evidentiary bearing on job performance still be part of our workplace practices if we’re striving towards fairness and equity? Instead of using CVs, we recommend using application screening questions with a consistently applied scoring framework to help your shortlisting decisions make more sense. You can download template screening questions here, and our bias-reducing CV template here.  

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It’s 2002. I’m sitting in my year 9 Life Skills class at the age of 14 and three-quarters, desperately trying to manufacture a half-passable CV out of my then very limited work experiences, (not sure if playing diplomatic older sister to a tyrannical, arm-biting toddler counts?), in order to prove to a prospective employer hanging out somewhere in “the future”, that I’m worthy of the experience of working for them. A couple of decades and a generous dollop of life experience later, I’ve been responsible for reviewing hundreds of CVs for a variety of roles and find myself still wondering why we bother with them?  

Since the use of CVs has been fairly formalised since the 1950s, (thanks in no small part to the influence of self-help books like Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich which included advice on “how to create a killer CV”), it’s probably difficult to imagine why we wouldn’t just continue using them. But as anyone who’s ever kept a too-tight pair of jeans in their wardrobe for too long will tell you, longevity alone isn’t a good enough reason to maintain something that’s no longer serving you, and in recent years there’s been increasing recognition that using CVs simply isn’t consistent with diversity, equity and inclusion goals. Beverage company Molson Coors for example, who produce major beer brands such as Carling have stopped using CVs in their selection process in a bid to make their recruitment process more inclusive. 

But what exactly is the problem with using CVs?  

The simple answer is that CVs aren’t really fit for purpose - either for selecting the so-called “right candidate”, or, more importantly, for achieving workplace equity. One of the key markers of a fair and equitable recruitment process is that it is as objective as possible, and to do that, you need to limit the opportunity for biases to influence decision-making. The reality is that CVs, and the cover letters that usually accompany them, are a completely subjective method for assessing a candidate’s ability to perform a role as shortlisting decisions are ultimately based on the value that an individual hiring manager places on the information contained in a CV. 

The term “curriculum vitae” when loosely translated essentially means the “course of one’s life”, and if you think about it, that’s really all a CV is – a bibliography of opportunities granted to a person throughout the course of their life so far. The problem is that this often then becomes a self-perpetuating prophecy of the opportunities that they’re likely to access in the future.  

This is because the way we’ve been taught to standardise CVs is riddled with opportunities for our brains to take cognitive shortcuts by using old information and experiences to form inference-based conclusions – also known as unconscious bias.  The example CV below illustrates this perfectly.  

(The above image has been adapted to make it relevant to our sector. To see the original, please visit recruitment website Applied. )

From the example above, we can see that: 

• Knowing a candidate has worked for an organisation that is generally regarded as prestigious and highly sought after could cause a recruiter to conclude that the candidate must be of a high calibre simply because they’ve worked for that organisation (never mind that they may only have gotten in because their Aunt’s-cousin’s-golf-buddy’s-gardener worked for someone who worked there); 

• Once an assumption has been made regarding the candidate’s calibre, other information which could be interpreted negatively is instead interpreted favourably; 

• Information supplied by candidates, such as courses taken and places they’ve studied can incite a sense of affinity between a recruiter and candidate (this is sometimes known as the “school tie effect”) 

• Characteristics such as age, which are supposed to be protected and should technically be hidden are still possible to calculate / assume based on the years that they were in education; in the UK for example, the majority of undergraduate students go to university immediately after completing their A Levels at the age of 18 – if you know when a person was 18, you can easily work out how old they might be now (don’t pretend your brain doesn’t automatically try to do the maths).

This is also why simply redacting candidate’s names from CVs isn’t sufficient to full overcome bias in recruitment. Make no mistake, discrimination in recruitment on the basis of candidate’s names is still very much a real problem; as recently as 2019, researchers from Oxford University found that job applicants from minoritised ethnic groups have to send 60% more applications in order to receive a callback or invitation to interview compared with White British candidates. But whilst name anonymisation is well-intentioned, as far as progress towards reducing bias goes it’s a pretty Bambi-like step – clumsy and in danger of teetering off course.  Apart from the fact that names aren’t always an indicator of a candidate’s characteristics, anonymising a CV may just result in delayed discrimination as any bias which might be linked to a candidate’s name, (most likely ethnicity or gender), will probably still emerge later on in the selection process, or worse still, once they’ve started the role. 

There’s also the problem of working out who can be bothered / can be trusted to do the redacting in the first place. This is especially tricky for small teams or organisations where there aren’t many people to call upon other than those directly involved in the hiring process and in some niche sectors where everyone knows everyone, could prove to be a complete waste of time as  it might still be possible to work out the identity of a candidate from their job title and the organisation they worked at, even without their name. Essentially, unless you’re willing to get rid of lots of other information in addition to a candidate’s name, relying on CVs in your recruitment decision making is still likely to result in about as much fairness and balance as putting a goldfish on a seesaw with an elephant.  

To make matters worse, CVs are also incredibly unreliable when it comes to accurately predicting how well a candidate will perform in a job. In their meta-analysis of different types of recruitment selection methods, researchers Schmidt and Hunter (1998) found that CVs contain some of the weakest indicators of a person’s ability. For example, education has only a 0.10 correlation to job performance and experience has only a 0.18 correlation, which basically means that these factors are only a little better than random chance at predicting job performance - you may as well shortlist candidates by picking names out of a hat.  

So, if you stop using CVs to screen applicants, what should you use instead? 

Our recommendation is that you use role-related, competency-based screening questions which provide candidates with an opportunity to demonstrate their skills and expertise. As well as avoiding the types of biases mentioned above, the main benefit of using screening questions is that it will help you to better systematise your shortlisting process as you can score candidates on the answers that they give, similar to the way we recommend scoring interview questions. This will give you a much clearer rationale for those who have been shortlisted, meaning you can give more transparent and meaningful feedback if a candidate asks for it, and you can overcome power imbalances between colleagues more easily if differences of opinion rise.  

Using application screening questions is also just a heck a lot of simpler. Although the broad content of CVs tends to stay the same, CVs are often supplied in a variety of wild and wonderful ways depending on how candidates choose to format them – some have photos, some don’t, some include personal interests, others have the candidate’s date of birth (yes, some people are still doing this in 2023), and some follow the peculiar trend of including a thermometer-like, self- rated scale of their skills and experiences, deftly displaying a show of humility by not simply awarding themselves  full marks on everything. Given the variety, any attempt at a side-by-side comparison of candidate’s skills and competencies based on their CVs is likely to result in a weird game of spot the difference.  

Of course, we get that for a lot of people, the prospect of not using CVs might just feel too radical, and even if you’re personally sold on the idea, you might have a hard time persuading colleagues to let them go.   If your organisation really isn’t ready to let go of CVs altogether, another alternative is to provide candidates with specific guidance and / or an anonymised application form that will enable them to provide key information that would ordinarily be found in their CV, whilst omitting other information that might induce bias. For example, you could ask candidates to list their work history and experience, but only ask for job title and key responsibilities rather than asking for the employer’s details and the specific dates that the candidate worked there. (If you feel you absolutehttps://www.reddit.com/r/UKJobs/comments/1cbq6kh/employers_asking_you_to_re_enter_your_cv_on_their/ly must, you could also ask candidates to stipulate their length of service in a role without including specific dates, however it’s worth bearing in mind that even years of experience isn’t a reliable predictor of a candidate’s suitability for a role). You could also do the same thing with asking for a candidate’s qualifications in that you could just ask them to state the qualification, subject, and grade or level attained, without asking for the institution they studied at, or the dates they studied there.  

If you do choose to use this option, just keep in mind that this won’t enable you to use a structured scoring system for shortlisting, so you’ll ultimately still be reliant on the subjective judgments of those involved in the selection process (though hopefully those judgements will be a little more bias-free!). The other thing to be aware of is that asking candidates to transpose their normal CV into an online application form might annoy some people and put them off applying as they’re likely to feel it’s a waste of their time – to get around this, we’d advise adding a brief explainer so that candidates know why you’re doing things in this way – you can nab some wording to back up your rationale from our anonymised CV guidance here.  

If you are brave enough to let go of using CVs in your selection process, we’d love to hear about your experience and the difference that it’s made to your organisation.  

Want help designing your application process? Get in touch with us today.  

P.S. If you’re a history geek like me, you’ll appreciate this super nerdy infographic from the National Careers Service on the history of the CV: https://visual.ly/community/Infographics/business/history-cv 

How to Go CV-Free (PDF Copy).pdf

Download PDF • 7.87MB

Screening Question Prompts Cheatsheet (2).pdf

Download PDF • 57KB

Application Screening Questions 

<Include blurb on how to write application screening questions> 

Specific Guidance 

To help us ensure that our recruitment process is as free from bias as possible, please remove the following information from your CV before sending it to us: 

• Your date of birth (if it’s on there) 

• A photo of yourself (if you’ve included one) 

• Names of your former employers / companies that you’ve worked at, and the dates that you worked there 

• Names of any schools, colleges or institutions that you’ve studied at, and the dates that you studied there 

• Names and contact details of referees (especially where contact details contain professional email addresses which include the company name) 

• Any references to personal interests, or memberships to organisations which might reveal characteristics about you that would be considered protected (e.g. age, gender, ethnicity, disability, religion, sexual orientation, or nationality) 

• Any links to social media profiles which might reveal any of the above information 

You can find an example of the type of CV we’re looking for here.