Is Your CV Alone Enough To Get Hired Today? Experts Weigh In

Business Insider recently asked if the CV has lost its purpose in the age of AI. Amanda Hoover wrote that online job portals are “launching them into the void” and that recruiters are turning to LinkedIn, referrals and work trials instead. The piece describes a hiring climate where listing past jobs is no longer enough and candidates must essentially start showing their skills in a more practical and measurable way.

Matt Craven, founder and careers expert, disagrees with the idea that the CV is dead. In a March 5 LinkedIn post titled “CVs are dead!” he wrote, “Or so everyone keeps predicting.” He added, “I don’t think the CV is becoming obsolete anytime soon.” For more than twenty years, he said, people have forecast its end, from video CVs to blockchain credentials. “Yet the CV is still the universal currency of the job market.”

Craven believes the reason is structural… He said, “The CV is at the centre of how recruitment works,” he wrote. Recruiters review it, hiring managers request it and HR systems store and parse it. “Remove the CV and you would have to change how the whole hiring system operates.” He concluded, “So no, I don’t think the CV is likely to become obsolete anytime soon, but it will evolve.”

What Are Recruiters Doing Instead?

The Business Insider piece describes what it calls the “show your work era of job hunting.” At Foxglove, a robotics platform, candidates complete paid work trials. Ellis Neder, now head of design, once flew to San Francisco for a long weekend trial. He now oversees them and tells applicants, “We expect you to use AI, and we will give you whatever AI tools you want.” He added, “We want them to see what it’s like to really work with us.”

Data supports this move toward looking at skills instead of just the CV. Research published in Harvard Business Review in 2022 found that between 2017 and 2019 companies dropped degree requirements by 46% for middle skill roles and by nearly a third for high skill roles. A 2025 survey from the National Association of Colleges and Employers found that employers using skills based hiring came up from 65% to 70% between 2024 and 2025. The Brookings Institution reported that job postings requiring AI skills rose from about 50,000 in March 2024 to nearly 200,000 last month.

Jake Ward, cofounder of Contact, posted on LinkedIn, “I don’t care about your CV or what degree you have. Just what you’ve created, written, launched, or the results you’ve driven.” He later said, “All we really care about is results … and a CV doesn’t tell you that, their past experience does.” He added, “I would love to see the thing that broke and how you thought about that thing and how you got it back to where it needs to be.”

Is The CV Changing Or Disappearing?

Even as work trials gain ground, institutions continue to refine CV standards. The UK Parliament’s guidance makes anonymity a priority. “Please do not include any personal information on your CV,” it advises, listing name, age, address and education provider among details to leave out. The goal is a fair process for all candidates.

The guidance also advises applicants to show outcomes, where candidates are to “focus on your achievements rather than just describing your role” and reminds them that a hiring manager wants to know how well you completed tasks and jobs.

Craven shares that view by saying, “Employers want to answer one simple question… Can this person do the job, and can they do it well?”

He adds, “CVs remain the fastest way to make that judgement.”

The format may evolve, and live assessments may grow, but the first screen for many employers continues to start with a document that proves performance in black and white.

Is this a view that is shared, though? Well, experts have commented on the matter, answering to whether CVs are a thing of the past. This is what they said:
 

Our Experts:

Barb Hyman, Founder and CEO, Sapia.ai

“Automation and digitalisation are fundamentally changing job descriptions and the skills required to add value to streamlined processes that can be carried out by technology. This presents a new challenge for talent acquisition teams who have typically relied on CVs and the evidence of direct experience when filling vacancies. To build a resilient workforce, logistics firms must focus on potential over experience and invest in skills that match requirements. By adopting an ethical, ‘Glass Box’ approach to hiring where every decision is explainable, and fair, employers can discover true long-term potential and future-proof the workforce.”

“The real barrier for young people is a lack of opportunity for them to show their potential to employers. Most hiring systems still rely on CVs and past experience, which automatically filters out teenagers before they’ve even had a chance.

What AI-led interviews can do differently is assess how someone thinks, communicates and approaches work, not just what they’ve done before. That gives young people a fairer first shot, which is exactly what’s missing from the system today.”

Johan Konst, Founder, EUSA PR

“I am the founder of EUSA PR with tech clients with focus Europe and USA and I also founded another pr agency where i had a lot of interviews.

“I do see a shift happening. In tech public relations, a CV often tells you very little about how someone actually thinks or whether they can spot a possible pr story.

“Nowadays regularly use short assignments instead. They show motivation, creativity, and how someone approaches a real challenge. Those things matter more to us than job titles or degrees.

“Creativity especially is hard to teach and almost impossible to capture on paper. So hiring is moving away from “what’s on your CV” toward “how do you think and what can you do for this tech client?”. People can be really surprising sometimes, which is a good think i think. That’s a meaningful change in how people are evaluated if you ask me.”

Crawford Warnock, Founding Director, Firstname Communications

“If my recent experience is anything to go by, CVs are not going anywhere. Across four or five different discussions, people have asked for my CV as a quick way of assessing the relevance and extent of my expertise. The gist has been ‘we hear what you are saying in conversation, but we need something a bit more formalised and written to use as the basis of any checks that follow on from this’.

“That is quite a difference from the reasons behind my first CV, some 30 years ago. Back then, the document was more about showing off to get a foot in a door, not to reassure and direct next steps.

“But the fact the same document has stuck around, with a consistent format, shows that it is still necessary. Of course, how a CV is used, has now come in for a lot of flack – keyword filtering for applications for example, has led to a lot of missed opportunities to spot real talent in many industries. But the CV itself, is the tardigrade of HR documentation and is not going anywhere just yet…”