Still evaluating candidates

My role went in March, in a global restructuring that took several hundred people with it. Since then I've been looking for the next one, senior People and Culture and Talent Acquisition roles mostly across Europe, while upskilling in AI and starting a consultancy with my wife Sofia.

I've sent around sixty-five applications. About a third came back with an automated rejection, some of them inside 24 hours. Four turned into a screening conversation. Generally the rest is silence. A few days ago an email arrived about a role I applied for two months ago, wanting me to know they were still evaluating candidates. I'd forgotten I'd applied.

I've spent most of my career on the other side of that inbox. I worked in recruitment inside the London office of a global law firm, and before that ran recruitment across nine offices in eight countries for an immigration practice hiring close to three hundred people a year. I've written the screening criteria and made the call on who came through and who didn't. On the roles I ran, everyone who applied got an answer, even when the answer was no. With several hundred applicants that didn't always hold, but it held for most of them, and it was the standard we worked to.

So what has changed? The document at the front of the process is the same one I was reading in 2015. The experience of applying is not. The obvious explanation is volume: employers now receive far more applications than anyone can read, and something in the process has to give. If the CV is the thing sitting at the front of the queue, it's the natural thing to blame, and plenty of people have started asking whether it's finished as a tool.

I don't think it is, and it's worth being clear about why it's still standing.

Why the CV survives

Three things keep it alive, and none of them are sentimental.

It's comparable. Fifty CVs for one role can be read against each other in a way that fifty portfolios, fifty personal sites and fifty video introductions cannot. However crude that comparison is, it is at least a comparison.

It's portable. It moves between an application form, an agency, a hiring manager's inbox and a partner's phone without anything being lost or anyone needing a login.

And it's defensible. This is the one people don't say out loud. When a rejected candidate asks why, or a regulator asks how, or someone brings a discrimination claim, the firm has to show that every applicant was assessed against the same criteria using the same information. The applicant tracking system exists as much for that reason as for any efficiency it delivers. It's the get-out-of-jail card. Everyone was looked at the same way, and here is the record that proves it.

That's a real requirement rather than corporate cover, and it explains why the format has survived every predicted replacement for two decades. Anything hoping to displace the CV has to do that job too, and most of the alternatives don't even attempt it.

What's different now

The pressure sits in the funnel around the document, not in the document.

Applying used to cost the candidate something. Not much, but enough to work as a filter. Tailoring a CV and writing a covering letter took an evening, so most people applied for the roles they actually wanted. That cost has collapsed. The cost of assessment hasn't moved at all. A human still has to read the thing, and reading a CV properly — checking dates, working out whether a title means what it appears to mean, noticing the two-year gap — takes real minutes. Multiply that by a few hundred applicants and you have a team that cannot do the job it's being asked to do.

So the funnel gets defended rather than redesigned. Keyword filters tighten. Knock-out questions multiply. Auto-rejections come back inside a day.

There's a second change and it matters more. On a lot of roles an AI now runs the first sift before a person sees anything at all. I understand exactly why: it saves time the team doesn't have, and the alternative is a queue nobody can clear. It also means the first decision about a candidate is taken by something that can only read what's on the page, in the format it expects to find it in. Strong people get filtered out that way, and nobody in the process ever finds out it happened. The screening criteria I used to write were built from the job description and applied by someone who could tell when a candidate was interesting for a reason the description hadn't anticipated. That judgement is the part that's quietly disappearing.

The volume problem also used to be uneven. Junior and generalist roles were overwhelmed; senior and specialist searches often weren't, and I've opened roles for experienced lawyers where the entire applicant pool would have fitted in a taxi. That is not what I'm looking at now. Almost every role at my level I've seen advertised on LinkedIn this year shows more than a hundred applicants. One showed six hundred. One had gone past a thousand, and I closed the tab without applying, because what would have been the point. Producing a credible-looking tailored CV now takes minutes, so the roles that used to filter on effort don't any more. People click and hope at every level, and having spent five months in the queue myself, I find it hard to blame them.

There's something in that last bit worth sitting with. A visible applicant count does its own filtering, and it filters hardest on the people who have other options and can do the arithmetic. The thousand-applicant role didn't lose me because I wasn't a fit. It lost me because I could count.

I'm not writing this from outside the problem. Volume on the junior roles was always the pressure point, and there were things we could have done about it that we didn't. Tighter criteria at the top of the funnel. Assessment that asked something of the applicant. The roles were getting filled, so it never became the thing we fixed. What's changed since is that the volume has arrived everywhere at once, and the fix has stopped being optional.

One thing I'd add

If I were rebuilding this today I'd keep the CV, for the reasons above, and add a step at the point of application. A short recorded answer to two or three questions, the same questions for every applicant, watched by a person after the CV rather than instead of it.

One-way video has a poor reputation and it has earned most of it, because it's usually been deployed as a mass screening-out device where nobody watches most of the recordings and candidates get marked on delivery. That isn't what I mean. I mean a few minutes of someone talking about how they'd approach a problem, which tells you things a CV structurally cannot: whether they can explain their own work, whether the experience on the page is really theirs, how they think when they aren't editing.

It also puts cost back on the applicant's side. Some people won't bother, and that's rather the point. It prices out the scattergun application without pretending the underlying document was ever the problem.

What's really changing

The shift I can actually see is in what sits alongside the CV. At senior level, the thing that moves a conversation forward is evidence of how someone thinks before you meet them: work samples, a portfolio, and for someone at my level a personal website.

I mean a website of your own, not a LinkedIn profile. LinkedIn puts everyone into the same template and rewards the same behaviour, and a recruiter can predict what they'll find there before they open it. A site is the one place where you decide what a hiring manager reads and in what order. Of those sixty-five applications, two or three had a field for a personal website next to the LinkedIn URL, and the firms asking for it were noticeably the ones I wanted to work for. That number should be far higher than it is.

I'm using AI in my own search, and it's worth being clear about how. I'm not using it to apply at volume; I've deliberately gone the other way. I use it to work through a job description properly, test whether I actually match it, and surface things from years of work I'd stopped thinking of as relevant. A thinking tool applied to a smaller number of better applications. If everyone used it that way the volume problem would largely disappear, which is precisely why they won't.

This site is part of the same idea. I'd rather a hiring manager or a headhunter reached a first call already knowing how I think about a problem, and the CV was never going to carry that. It's close to the argument I keep making in the advisory work we started this year at Newbery Advisory, where firms ask how AI changes their hiring and the more useful question turns out to be what their process was already failing to do.

The CV will outlast most of what's been proposed to replace it. The difficulty is the weight a far bigger funnel now asks it to carry, and the answer to that was never going to be a better document.

If you're hiring at senior level at the moment: what's the last thing you learned about a candidate before the first call that the CV hadn't told you?