Is the CV dying? (Anyone have AFR access?) – Mike Starrs

[gareth.jones@business-analysis.com.au]

Based on this LinkedIn post I’ve just come across, it seems like some companies are ditching CV’s and looking at LinkedIn profiles, not just for your experience, but for your level of activity and engagement on the platform.

https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6306398026286100480

Will the CV be dead in a few years or take longer to disappear?More companies are shifting away from recruiting/promoting candidates via the old CV and asking employees and new recruits to use @Linkedin – and they are expecting employees to not just have a perfect profile but to be actively using it. Recruiters are also telling me they look at an active LI profile to check the candidate actually gets the digital world.

I don’t have access to the Australia Financial Review to read the linked article, but if you do I’d love to see the contents here 🙂

Definitely an interesting comment on the LinkedIn post though, it’s more than just what you’ve done, it’s what you’re doing.

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Mike Starrs
8/29/17
Found a related story about NAB’s transition away from CV’s and in-person interviews – http://www.hcamag.com/hr-news/national-australia-bank-ditches-cvs-facetoface-interviews-240419.aspx

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Gareth Jones
8/29/17
Re: [Forum] Re: Is the CV dying? (Anyone have AFR access?)
Other recipients: mike….@busanalysts.com.au
I do think it is interesting regarding the shift towards online profiles over more ‘traditional’ application processes. It really does highlight the importance for us individually to maintain a current, active, online presence and personal brand (nothing highlights activity like giving back to the industry in which we work).

As suppliers to the market, BAPL will of course need to be responsive to this. So I encourage you all to please maintain both your CVs and linked-in profiles to improve the efficiency with which BAPL can respond to individual pieces of work across various channels.

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Mike Starrs
8/29/17
Re: [Forum] Re: Is the CV dying? (Anyone have AFR access?)
This is probably a different discussion, but your comment that we should maintain updated LinkedIn profiles is interesting as I’ve been wondering about this for a while.

How much information can we put in our profile for the engagements we’ve worked on? Can we mention clients or just the industry? How much of the project can be put into LinkedIn without breaching any confidentiality or unwanted exposure of clients in public?

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Gareth Jones
8/29/17
Re: [Forum] Re: Is the CV dying? (Anyone have AFR access?)
Other recipients: mike….@busanalysts.com.au
Mike,

Great question, but one I don’t have a comprehensive answer for right now. Please leave it with me and I will get back to everyone with more guidance. Can we please put the conversation on hold until I do.

Cheers.

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Mike Starrs
9/5/17
AFR text below. Privacy/incognito mode = avoid paywalls. Hot tip of the day!

National Australia Bank has scrapped CVs and face-to-face interviews for thousands of entry-level jobs, arguing the move has slashed turnover rates and reduced the influence of prestigious universities or schools.

The move is part of a broader trend by large businesses to move away from traditional recruitment methods and use technology to radically reshape how they hire workers.

The bank piloted online recruitment about 12 months ago, introducing cognitive assessments and recorded video interviews, and has extended the approach to 2500 entry-level jobs a year.

Candidates are now tested on their natural problem-solving abilities through abstract questions such as selecting which picture comes next in a series.

They then send through a short recorded video interview in response to questions, which a computer screens for mentions of words, achievements and experience to provide a short-list of candidates for training.

NAB chief people officer Lorraine Murphy said the new model had saved more than 700 hours a month in management time, sped up recruitment and halved the turnover for new starters during training.

She argued the techniques were also more objective and meant recruiters were not basing their decision on what school or university you went to.

“The model helps us to identify and hire great people in a fairer, more effective way and reduce the risk of unconscious bias – things like your name, what school you went to are irrelevant,” she said.

“The model had been particularly well received by digitally-savvy candidates, who the bank is keen to hire.”

While Ms Murphy said this would not be the immediate end of the CV, she said employers were increasingly relying on digital channels for information.

“LinkedIn is now a far more common way to display background information, and companies now have far greater access to information.”

NAB follows other major companies that have redefined recruitment such as L’Oreal in China, which discarded the resume and brought in online video interviews for trainee hires in 2015.

Insurer AMP has also started using computer games to test candidates’ cognitive speed and attention span.

CV ‘work of fiction’
University of Melbourne Professor in management, Michelle Brown, told the Australian Financial Review that CVs were increasingly seen as outdated and “almost works of fiction”.

“They’re not really particularly accurate. People say they’ve got qualifications which they haven’t, done subjects they didn’t do, have experiences they don’t really have. They may not lie but they embellish.”

Referees were also “pretty rubbish” since candidates were unlikely to pick a referee who did not have good things to say about them.

She welcomed the new cognitive tests as more objective and more suited to the job.

“In the past, employers have just used this one criteria which is the university candidates came from – which is connected to socio-economic status because poor people go to the less expensive universities.

“Now they’re looking at more jobs appropriate criteria and presumably moving towards greater diversity and diverse educational background.”

Professor Brown also said traditional interviews were proving to be “a poor predictor of a person’s subsequent performance” but was cautious over the increasing acceptance of recorded interviews.

While NAB said candidates appreciated the new video interviews were faster and could be done at home, Professor Brown said her students “despised them”.

“They flip out because how do you do it? What kind of background do I have? What do I wear? It’s hard to be yourself under those circumstances.”

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Ashley Cox
9/6/17
CV’s are only loosing integrity due to the laziness of hiring practices (often outsourced) and the general slide to the hiring model of “let’s see whats sticks to thew wall”. The whole purpose of a CV is to provide a history of experience and education, it is the role of the hiring manager to verify the details in the CV just as they would have to do on a social medial site like LinkedIn. Suffice to say there is little more integrity with LinkedIn as there is in a resume, only difference is it is quicker and easier to edit “embellished” details on LinkedIn.

The “slide” is associated with laziness and is directly connected to ease of access to “data” using social media sites for employee backgrounds, like LinkedIn, to browse the experience and education of a candidate rather than examining it (same phenomenon exists with how people search and uptake information these days on the internet). This is also significantly compounded with the well documented subconscious bias induced from a profile photo that is generally displayed on a social media site.

Lets us not also forget that this also totally ignores the issue with such detailed information about yourself being freely avail to the public, this significantly increases your risk of identity fraud and the misuse of your details by nefarious parties. I guess one has to decide if the risk of exposing these details to the public is worth the potential reward that an employer is focused on social medial over standard hiring practices……..

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Mike Starrs
9/6/17
Is it really about laziness though, or just a more effective use of technology to make the process more efficient and responsive to the rapid needs or recruitment? It’s tedious to print off a stack of CV’s and review them on the train ride home when you can just brows profiles on your phone and see the same information. You see stories from recruiters on LinkedIn often talking about how candidates were dragged along rigid hiring processes for weeks and bailed to go somewhere else that was able to respond to them and provide an offer more seamlessly. LinkedIn is still a CV, but the toolset behind it for recruiters offers efficiencies they can’t get from paper, and with the number of applicants may jobs are getting these days, I hardly consider being time-smart a trait of laziness. And let’s face it, recruiters using technology to filter the best candidates are helping to enhance the AI that will one day replace many of their jobs anyway when it comes to skill-matching and generating a shortlist for interview.

Photos are just an extension of the existing bias people see when they read a name at the top of the CV, or estimate the age of a candidate and their maturity based on when or what schools they attended. Subconscious bias will exist regardless of the platform your history is presented.

I could go on a tangent about the last point, but it dips into a whole lot of political and other touchy subjects. I’ll just assume if you’re worried about your work history being available to your connected network, you have a wide ranging approach touching all aspects of your life to protect against identity theft as well.

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Horry Walker
9/6/17
Other recipients: mike….@busanalysts.com.au
Hi Mike,

Thanks for the post.

While I recognise that the scrapping of CV’s is at entry level jobs and note the comment further in the article from Ms Murphy who said this would not be the immediate end of the CV, she said employers were increasingly relying on digital channels for information.

A couple of points from a BAPL Sales Perspective and a customer perspective:

From a sales perspective in the professional services space that I live in with BAPL the CV is our first insight to our next hire, and let me share with you that the next steps in the recruitment process is fairly daunting in uncovering really great BA talent. And yes, we use Linked In to drill down further, followed by several interviews and then reference checks.

To be candid with you the single source of truth is the CV, it’s what we live or die by in lining up all the other processes.

From our customers perspective, take all of what we do in our recruitment process and add it to theirs and guess what: The first question is “Can I see a CV!

From my humble point of view the CV works really well when the content of the CV aligns to the personality of the resource and the BS factor is taken out of the equation.

Hey Mike, thanks for the post and for stimulating thoughts around the group.

Horry Walker | Business Analysts Pty Ltd

[charissa.jones@business-analysis.com.au]

As the person being recruited (and also through discussions / assistance given to my husband during recruitment processes at his firm) I would say: keeping a ‘hard copy’ of your CV is essential. It is a part of employee record keeping and gives you a point-in-time reference for staff you hire and a benchmark for development and growth. As Horry mentions somewhere above – “the single source of truth is the CV” and it is what BAPL clients ask for when we put someone forward to fill a position.

With regards to using Linked In for internal recruitment however:
Recruiters are using already software to ‘weed out’ or sort through the many CVs that flow in from job ad websites based on key words for specific selection criteria they are looking for. The government assigns points to selection criteria responses based on the use of key words (info provided to me by a friend in the CCC – aka: CMC). What Linked In does is it makes visible exactly what those key words are. Job ads are required to list out specific skills they want applicants to possess. Each person can attribute varying skills to themselves and enables people to leverage their network to endorse those skills. Yes – it shows you actually get the digital world… but more so, it shows you are conscious of having a digital professional profile. It shows your connections and how respected you are within your network and it also shows how ‘well groomed’ you are and whether your presentation suits the organisation looking to hire you – what it says about them that they hired you.

In the end – good recruitment will always come back to diligent recruiters / companies. That’s a no-brainer. But how many great candidates get lost in the ‘electronic filter’ applied to traditional CVs that are now made visible by the more transparent job application process Linked In has developed??

Just a few thoughts to throw in the mix… 🙂
Charissa

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