Transcript: Is the CV dead?

This is an audio transcript of the Working It podcast episode: ‘Is the CV dead?’

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Jess Woodward-Jones
People are so much more than their CV, they’re so much more than their work experience, they’re so much more than their education. Candidates have been ready for a different way of applying for roles for a very, very long time.

Isabel Berwick
Hello and welcome to Working It from the Financial Times. I’m Isabel Berwick.

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For as long as I’ve been working, CVs or résumés have been the main way for job applicants to show off their credentials. But they can be a serious pain for managers and candidates alike. A 2023 report from TestGorilla, which helps employers test job candidates, found that 82 per cent of employers still used CVs to screen candidates, but more than 40 per cent of respondents said they find it difficult to find out from a CV what skills an applicant actually has. Still, the majority of employers, seven in 10, believed CVs were effective at determining a candidate’s abilities. Are CVs really the best way to fill roles? Can we come up with something better? And if so, what might that look like? Jess Woodward-Jones has an idea. It’s her voice you heard at the top of the show. Jess is one of the co-founders of Vizzy, a company looking to replace the drab CV with something slicker. I asked Jess if she thought CVs were outdated and she didn’t mince her words.

Jess Woodward-Jones
We think the CV is dead, certainly with some generations. Let’s take the younger generations, for example, like Gen Z, who are a digitally first generation. They’re entrepreneurial. They embrace change. So using the CVs is their first screening tool to assess potential. It’s just not fit for purpose. And we know that businesses want better insights into their candidates. They wanna build better teams, more diverse teams. They wanna provide more equal opportunities for candidates to really be seen. And they wanna see personality and (inaudible) skills. So the CV therefore is very outdated and it’s limiting, and it’s also rather boring.

Isabel Berwick
So for anyone listening who doesn’t hire people, how are CVs used and what are the flaws in that process in your view?

Jess Woodward-Jones
Yeah. So you know the CV is centuries old and we’re still holding on to it. It’s still that sheets of paper. It’s still that Word doc. And it’s still predominantly educational status and work experience with a bit of skills thrown in. And it’s that really that is failing businesses. You know, work experience for example and taking the early talent market, you know, naturally given their age, they haven’t got a huge amount of work experience to talk about. And if they do, it’s probably because they’ve got good networks and connections. So when we look at these really exciting career pages of some of the world’s biggest businesses, you know, they want to hire original thinkers, but then you hit apply and wham! It says, please upload your CV. So these young people, who’ve got a lot more to say about themselves than the work experience, it’s kind of failing both sides. Businesses aren’t getting the insights they need from the get-go and candidates have not got any decent opportunity to really showcase who they are from the get-go.

Isabel Berwick
So could you paint us this audio picture of what a Vizzy candidate profile looks like? How is it different?

Jess Woodward-Jones
Yeah, so Vizzy comes from the word visibility. We are a CV replacement tool. So it’s a profile. You log on, or if a business has just launched a new opportunity on LinkedIn or their careers page, they hit apply now. And instead of going to that form which says please upload your CV, it goes straight to this bespoke landing page. And then they go through and they sign in and they log on to their Vizzy profile. It captures psychometrics, there’s a very short psychometric test that’s built in. It takes about five minutes to do, but it homes straight in on the candidate’s strengths straight away. And traditionally in the application process, if anyone is lucky enough to be asked to do a psychometric test, it’s much further down the line and usually they don’t even see the results. Whereas with Vizzy, you see it as the candidate. So you understand what your strengths are and you get to build your profile out around that. And then elsewhere on the profile, you get to talk about your interests, you get to talk about your ambitions. You can upload images and GIFs and links. It’s way more digitally friendly than the CV, shall we say. There’s other prompts which really allow candidates to go further into their personality. So it’s almost like an application form and a CV rolled into one. So yeah. So it’s a much more holistic way of looking at the individual.

Isabel Berwick
What are the biggest bugbears that candidates have about the way CVs work, you know, and what do you hear?

Jess Woodward-Jones
I think the lack of the opportunity to really tell the employer who they are and what they can do, people are so much more than their CV. They’re so much more than their work experience. They’re so much more than their education. And we’re absolutely hearing that. I mean, candidates have been ready for a different way of applying for roles for a very, very long time. I mean, as well as it’s being outdated, I’m sure, like many people listening to this, I’ve been in situations with the CV where it’s been horribly biased, where I’ve heard candidates being selected for interview because they went to the same university as the boss, or they studied the same degree. And even though significant studies confirm that experience doesn’t predict a new hire success, we still shortlist people based on a past role or an industry that’s relevant to the job in question. Because what else have we got to go on with the CV?

Isabel Berwick
Could you tell us a bit more about the psychometric side of Vizzy? What kind of information does it provide? What’s it based on?

Jess Woodward-Jones
Yeah, so our psychometrics is a mix between the Jungian and the DiSC theory. And it’s like five to seven minutes to do within the Vizzy profiles. It’s right there on your profile. You log in. It’s right there, easy to take. And then you get your results straight away. And it tells you whether you’re an extrovert, an introvert, and it gives you your key strengths and what you bring to a team. It gives you your creative and problem-solving strengths. So we’ve created a tool that actually helps people unlock their strengths at the beginning of the candidate process, which I think is really exciting because you start talking about the equal opportunities piece. A lot of young people that just don’t really know what their strengths are, and yet they’ve got loads of them. They find out their strengths. It’s eerily accurate. And then they get to build out their profile around the strengths that have been uncovered in their psychometrics.

Isabel Berwick
I mean, I know Vizzy is quite new, but do you have any data yet about tracking retention or promotion for candidates who are recruited through Vizzy rather than other ways?

Jess Woodward-Jones
Yeah. Conversion rate is really high. It slightly changes, client by client. But on average 72 per cent of candidates are going all the way through that process, so they’re fully filling out the Vizzy profile and then hitting submit and sending off to businesses to look at. We know the benchmark for traditional CV conversion rate is roughly around 40 per cent. So we’re way above that average benchmark. And we’re really, really proud of it because business is working really hard to get talent to their pages. You’ve got to get them to actually convert and hit submit. And that’s where I think a lot the drop-off happens.

Isabel Berwick
Have you tried it on older people? Like old Gen Xers like me?

Jess Woodward-Jones
Yeah, we have. Not as many as the younger generations, but I don’t see why it wouldn’t work for older generations. So obviously, I think for some it would be a little bit more alien than for others. But I worked with some incredible 50-year-olds who are very tech savvy. So when I hear people say, oh, I don’t think this is, I think this is just a younger generation thing I always think, I don’t think you’re right but we’ll see.

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Isabel Berwick
Jess, thanks so much for coming on to Working It.

Jess Woodward-Jones
Thank you so much for having me, Isabel. I’ve loved it.

Isabel Berwick
Trying to get a read on a candidate through a CV is not easy, and it’s definitely not a foolproof way to find out what someone is actually like. So I’m sympathetic to Jess’s mission to make hiring a little more human, and especially interested in the idea that more personality-driven hiring practices might make recruitment fairer. That’s one side of the argument, but am I bashing the CV a little unfairly? If it’s survived this long it can’t be all bad. I wanted to know more about why the CV has such sticking power, so I rang up my friend Jonathan Black. He’s the director of the University of Oxford’s Careers Service, so he has an inside track on what companies and younger applicants want from the recruitment process. I started by asking him if he thought the CV was the best companies could do.

Jonathan Black
I think a CV can’t really get across behavior and motivation. Why did you move to another job? What’s been motivating you? What’s important to you? How important are purpose and meaning and what you’re looking for. And that’s why recruiters then use interviews and use all those situational questions. Or they use other assessments to explore that. So what it can do is be your chance to explain how you take responsibility and you achieve things, and that you’re a nice person to have around.

Isabel Berwick
So you talk to hundreds, thousands of students. What do they think about CVs and the application process in general at the moment?

Jonathan Black
I think what mostly irritates people, not just students, is the different styles and approaches that employers want. Some people do want just a straight CV, but then recruiters might say, I don’t want a CV. I’d like you to cut and paste all of that into our form over here that’s very like a CV, but you’re retyping it. And then you go to another recruiter and they’ve done a different thing again.

Isabel Berwick
Just how dominant is the CV and this first step of hiring? Is it still ubiquitous?

Jonathan Black
Okay. This is for the student graduate/postgraduate market. But I think it’s over 95 per cent have said always or usually use a CV. And then they’ll use a lot of other things as well.

Isabel Berwick
Our guest Jess spoke about how using CVs as part of the recruitment process can lead to bias among hiring managers. Do you agree?

Jonathan Black
Well, I’m not sure if it encourages bias. The bias comes in when it’s “I’ve never heard of that university, I don’t know what that qualification is. Oh, this person’s come from that part of the world,” or something. Now, the best recruiters will then have several people from diverse backgrounds assessing applications separately to try to eliminate that bias. If you’re doing it on your own, you’ve just got to be fully aware that your own biases will come into play here. And try not to be influenced, but recognise you probably will be.

Isabel Berwick
And what can employers do, do you think, to make the recruitment process a little less painful? Because from everything I hear, it’s absolutely dreadful for many people.

Jonathan Black
So ask any questions that are really relevant and make sure the job description, for a start, is at the level of just what you need, not what you’d really like to have. So, for example, do you really need a degree to do this job? And then make the application form easy. Do you actually need a CV? Or how about 200 words on, you know, something about your background. And that way you can really select what you want people to find out, and you can put motivation and behaviors in there as well.

Isabel Berwick
So we’ve talked about how to make your CV appealing. But are there any good ways that applicants can add little twists, or are employers and potentially their machine learning tools just wanting a simple black and white document? You know, does a photo help, do colors help? Do funny fonts help?

Jonathan Black
Well, so in this country, photographs definitely do not help. We don’t want photographs because that will lead to bias as well. Oh, I don’t like people who look like this. We don’t want any of that. But yes, keep it simple. Clear layout, 10-point or larger font, twists could be in the bottom section, the interests and the community activities, and that’s a way to get over to people. This is something I wouldn’t mind sitting on a plane with for three hours.

Isabel Berwick
We’ve talked a bit on this podcast about some new ways of recruiting people — using video, for example. Are any of these gaining traction over the CV? What are you hearing?

Jonathan Black
Not over the CV, but would be the next step. So people would make an application, perhaps using a CV that gets electronically scored. And the next step can commonly now be a video interview where you get given the question and two minutes to record and sometimes rerecord your answer. You might have online tests. But the CV, I’m afraid, is still at the core of it with video that comes later.

Isabel Berwick
Jonathan, thanks so much for that and we’ll speak soon.

Jonathan Black
Thank you for having me.

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Isabel Berwick
CVs or resumes might not be glamorous, but there’s definitely something to be said for any process that makes you think hard about your strengths and what you’ve achieved. The CV isn’t going anywhere just yet, but that doesn’t mean the process can’t be improved. If you’re in a position to hire, think really carefully about how your processes might work against certain candidates and cause you to miss out on talented people. Thanks to Jess Woodward-Jones and Jonathan Black.

This episode of Working It was produced by Mischa Frankl-Duval and mixed by Simon Panayi. The executive producer is Manuela Saragosa and Cheryl Brumley is the FT’s global head of audio. Thanks for listening.