Ditch the CV to recruit the best grads for company success; it’s 2022

Hire for potential not credentials

It’s time to ditch the CV! Why such a bold statement? Because it’s 2022 and the CV has lost its relevance in today’s employment market. In fact it had some time ago. Identifying a graduate candidate’s true potential isn’t easily found in a CV, their soft skills are often hidden within the projects they have delivered. It is difficult to extract this information or easily compare other candidates. The traditional CV easily identifies a person, their background and education, location and continues to drive inequality by limiting social mobility. It also does little to help to recruit diverse teams. Bias can still creep into your graduate recruitment process right at the start. Alongside this, with the focus being on time to hire, exceptional candidates are potentially being overlooked.

According to recent information from the ISE (Institute for Student Employers) Graduate Vacancies were up 20% on 2019 hiring and up 22% compared to 2021. That’s a lot more applications to evaluate.

How can you tell what they really did?

Leading a recruitment process with a CV application is not going to be the easiest way to screen for the best possible graduate candidates. CV documents aren’t easy to review and there is no way to know what part people really play in their roles, and with a limited work experience, how do you compare two degrees from the same university? Then there is the time it takes to review the CVs that are received. Often CV weariness sets in. Given that a reference usually only confirms the dates a candidate worked in a role and what their job title was during that time, you cannot rely on being able to confirm what someone did or did not do and extract their soft skills. You might also have graduates with little to no work experience. A CV does nothing to demonstrate a candidate’s natural potential which is why it’s time to ditch the CV. If you need another compelling reason to ditch the CV, it’s this – by continuing to recruit this way is harming your company’s results.

It’s all about what you say

A CV favours those who are good at telling a good story, or someone who pays for their experience to be presented in a certain way. It doesn’t identify what the real potential of a candidate is. Plus if you have benefited from a certain education you may have the upper hand. Exceptional ability can make a significant difference to your business as it will drive through to the bottom line, by not finding those diamonds, you’re not getting that chance, or your teams are only half firing on potential.

Skills can be taught

We should be building teams for the long term and future-proofing businesses, not trying to fill gaps. In fact, if you mis-hire your graduates, gaps will keep appearing and staff retention will continue to be lower. A bad hire can damage morale and cause other talented employees to leave. So you spend more time trying to fill those holes. If someone is lacking certain skills they can be taught, but you either have talent, or you don’t. How many times have heard about the colleague who isn’t a team player, doesn’t quite fit with the expectations or worse isn’t very good at their job. Yet they still managed to pass the interview stages and were welcomed into the business. A better screening process could have identified this misfit at screening phase.

CVs aren’t built for mass recruitment

When you’re recruiting on a large scale basis, such as a graduate recruitment programme, you’ll understand how time consuming and challenging it is. So having to review masses of CVs and pick out those superstar applicants is particularly challenging. Graduates/college leavers don’t have a lot on their CV and it is difficult to compare their other interests and projects they have been involved in and then identify what that might mean. You need a better way of being able to identify those graduate candidates that have the potential to deliver great things for your company, as well as fit the culture within it.

CVs are unfair

..and at worst discriminatory. There are many parts of a CV that can identify something about a graduate candidate such as location, education and name. In doing so, bias will continue to proliferate the recruitment process. They do nothing to address social mobility or diversity challenges.

What can you learn about personality from a CV?

CVs don’t tell you much about a graduate’s personality, what actually motivates. They might tell you what that is on their CV but how close is that to reality?With culture fit being all important, you need a way to exclude those graduate candidates who don’t match your culture at the start of the process. Ditch the CV rather than waste time on non-starters and mis-hires.

CV selection is a process that is prone to human error

By taking time to go through each application, the risk of human error remains high. That isn’t to say that humans shouldn’t be involved in the recruitment process. Their skills are better used in the interview process. People make mistakes, they can misread information. This is why advice for job applicants is always to tailor a cv and covering letter to the job application. It shows interest and integrity and demonstrates ability and experience. This will please the weary eyed recruiter, who is glad that this graduate applicant has made it easy to review their skills and experience. However, it still doesn’t show what that candidate is actually capable of. It also doesn’t show what part they really had to play in all their various experiences.

Technology has its part to play in the future of recruitment

In the digital age, where we can all work smarter, it seems strange that still the biggest constant in a recruitment process is the use of a two page document. How can you get a sense of what a graduate candidate is truly capable of and what drives them from their CV? When we have the power of technology to design something different that can help us to identify superior talent, why do we continue to rely on the CV that has the inherent ability to enable bias and inequality to rule the recruitment process? Ditch the CV – and find an easier way to recruit the best grads.

The time to select on potential and culture fit is now

We created not a cv to deliver a fast recruitment screening solution to HR professionals that didn’t require new technology to be brought in-house. Our online platform is accessible from anywhere with no software or upgrades needed. We use clever technology to match candidates to your roles. There is nothing to pay until you decide you are interested in speaking to a graduate candidate. We only have one low cost fee for each grad taken forward. You can use our personality tests to prescreen graduates against your company culture. Our completely anonymised approach means that all bias is stripped out from the start of your process. Our online platform enables graduate candidates to load videos, portfolios and demonstrate their soft skills which allows the technology to match those candidates to the roles you are recruiting and the candidates that meet those requirements.

Ditch the CV and say hello to Not A CV!

It’s time to recruit the best, save on the time to screen and identify those diamond grads. Try Not A CV today.

Make a better choice! Not a CV is clever tech built by recruiters for fast-moving employers. We take the headache out of recruitment through our job psychometric, whole person view and machine learning. Why not join us on Twitter: @notacv and LinkedIn: Not a CV.