Despite living in a highly tech-driven world, the traditional CV still reigns in the recruitment industry. But there is now a way to make recruiting more ethical, time efficient and talent driven. Is this the beginning of the end for the CV? It should be.
Hiring is one of the most important processes in any business. Hire the wrong staff, face the consequences. Not only can it be detrimental to your business’s’ performance, but negligent recruitment can have a negative impact on staff morale.
More of the same and you could find yourself stuck in the revolving door of recruitment with a real retention problem.
With economic uncertainty looming across the UK, businesses are under more pressure to cut costs where possible and focus on tools to support efficiency. One way is to address your HR department and examine the company’s hiring process.
Each year, a company will waste hours and hours, as well as thousands of pounds, on the archaic method of reading through CV’s. But this isn’t necessary.
We are too reliant upon archaic recruitment approaches
Even though recruiters (in-house and agency alike) operate online, they typically rely on traditional hiring methods leaving companies at risk of hiring the wrong candidates.
One such method is the established CV-cycle, whereby employers rely on CVs as a way of assessing and shortlisting candidates. However, being dependent on this old-fashioned approach can be extremely laborious and expensive.
CVs are often impersonal, boring and sometimes false. While they arguably serve a purpose, they’re an inefficient element of the recruitment process that could be better replaced with a modem alternative.
If we break it down, CVs are essentially factual documents and nothing more: they serve to share a candidate’s work experience and education history with their prospective employer; they cannot reveal anything legitimate about a candidate’s character and/or personality.
Time wasted
Also, with the UK workforce suffering from a generation of job-hoppers, CVs are getting longer. Instead of the traditional two-pager, employers can find themselves facing a 10-page spread filled with plenty of part-time or freelance experience.
For the average role, an employer and/or recruiter reads 120 applications. With one CV taking on average 20 minutes to read, you can expect to spend over 40 hours trying to find the perfect employee. How many people have the time or resources to dedicate every hour of the working week dedicated to CV-screening? Not many.
We need a single, quick solution that can properly service the needs of both the candidate and employer.
As a result, sifting through CVs is an extremely tedious activity, leaving employers put-off owning their recruitment strategy, hiring an agency to oversee CVs in their stead. But it shouldn’t be like this. Employers shouldn’t feel forced to hire the help of ‘expert’ recruiters, who often come laden with hefty agency fees and a money-minded approach.
The solution: a single, integrated hiring solution outside the traditional CV-cycle.
Ditching the CV
There are few things an employer needs to know about their prospective employee: their skills, experience and qualifications. It’s an old-fashioned misconception that education, location and other such personal information is essential to a job application. These details only facilitate discrimination and data misuse.
Even though the recruitment sector is worth over 350 million USD, its reliance on out-dated practices is leaving the market fragmented, disjointed and weak. In an era of technological transformation, there’s a compelling need for the industry to catch up.
It’s imperative that the recruitment industry catches up for fear of being left in the dark ages.
We need a single, quick solution that can properly service the needs of both the candidate and employer. By stepping away from the traditional CV-cycle, we can begin creating a transparent alternative that provides greater visibility on the actual role/job specs and higher accountability with advanced levels of control on the hiring process and effective match-making.
Some startups are already taking steps towards modernising the recruitment sector, offering an algorithm-based alternative.
Should live profile cards replace the CV?
One approach is to give candidates live profile cards instead of CVs, so that they can keep their personal details protected and showcase their skills efficiently.
Live profile cards are one method of ensuring maximum transparency across both parties; candidates personal details are not included on the real-time profile card and they can be upfront about their reservations, constraints and expectations.
Discretion empowers candidates to be more upfront about who they are and what they want from their next roles. This ensures that they only get offers that suit their skills, experience, and aspirations precisely, providing candidates with a unique personalised job-seeking experience tailored specifically to meet their requirements.
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It’s time for the recruitment industry to play catch up
Overall, it’s clear that the CV-cycle is both out-of-date and inconvenient. We are in the era of instant coffee, paperless mortgages, motherless meat, voice-based virtual assistants, surgeries being performed virtually on patients, drone-based deliveries, augmented reality, AI-driven shopping experiences, staffless supermarkets and driverless cars.
It’s imperative that the recruitment industry catches up for fear of being left in the dark ages, which may have long-lasting consequences on the UK workforce.
