As the UK focuses on its service industry, behaviours, attitude and soft skills are essential for employees’ success. So what do we gain from a CV? It tells us where and what and perhaps even how long someone has stayed in a role. It judges people on their presentation and writing skills, but does not show us how they carried out their job. Did they smile every day? Did they do their very best?
How often do we remove people from the process, not really understanding them as people, and focusing more on the ‘brands’ on their CVs or which ‘red brick’ university they went to. Yet the reality could be that they were high maintenance as an employee, or lacked the agility to work in a team, or their unsafe, ‘top gun’-style behaviour is nowhere to be seen in the CV-driven pre-selection process.

Other considerations have coloured my ponderings. Recently, as a judge for the Recruiter Awards 2016, I was privileged to review recruitment innovations and new technology in our marketplace. Some of these technologies monitor and review social behaviours online, and can predetermine which candidates would suit our company and its culture.

Some technology can also register and analyse the social movement in potential candidates’ careers and how this affects our talent status right across the spectrum from ‘Potential’ to ‘Market Leader’. With tools such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, we determine who these people are and what they enjoy, what motivates them. We can see if they follow like-minded people in similar industries, or whether they lead their social groups.

Many years ago when working in software, the talent was not determined by a nine-box grid, but by peer reviews from concurring people – not just in the organisation or country, but globally and in academia, as well as in corporates.  

Software being developed now watches this online activity to determine their ‘fit’ for our companies through looking at how and where their activity takes them. This gives we employers an insight into which rivers these salmon run.

I spoke to Paul Holloway, executive recruiter from Microsoft, while perusing art in an exhibition. In his more structured view, the CV is not dead but is a map, a signpost for hiring managers to understand the journey and how candidates choose to present themselves. However for Paul, it’s his interactions after ‘reading the map’ that then determines the next stages of the selection process with one of the world’s iconic modern brands.

But this is could be true for only the more senior end of the spectrum. And as I have mentioned in previous articles, there are tools and techniques to be used at the more senior level to determine ‘the age of the child’ within the executive, reflecting their motivations, potentials and psychological characters.

So it still makes me question the value of the CV. When you just want a friendly, hard-working, engaged person to work in your team, is a CV the way forward in this modern age and with digital natives? Or will we fall behind, doing what we’ve always done?

Gregory Allen is global head of resourcing at Lloyd’s Register and winner of In-House Recruitment Leader of the Year at the 2015 Recruiter Awards