Will the future of recruiting be CV-free?

Tech is the place to look when you want an insight into the future of many different industries – and the same goes for recruitment.

During the early days of Covid-19, while many sectors talked excitedly about remote working, tech shrugged its shoulders. Remote working was nothing new in an industry where CEOs routinely wear hoodies.

The tech sector shapes the future of so many sectors – and so it follows that it holds many clues about the future of work.

That’s what makes the findings from the annual Tech Hiring Survey so interesting – and the most recent are no different.

Out with the old

The most recent survey, which polled more than 14,000 tech professionals and recruiters across more than 131 countries, suggests that big changes are afoot.

Some of the most notable insights included:

• 57% of recruiters being open to removing the CV from thew recruitment process completely
• The percentage of recruiters hiring developers from non-academic backgrounds doubling from 23% to 39%
• 42% of recruiters hiring more contingent workers than in the previous year

It goes without saying that these results are at least partly driven by a ceaselessly candidate-scarce market.

But is something more fundamental shifting in the way we recruit?

Skills over school

The importance of CVs within the recruitment process might be waning according to many HR and recruitment experts.

It’s been reported that around a third of jobseekers embellish qualifications to land a role. Furthermore, there’s been a notable shift in recruiters focusing on skills rather than academic backgrounds.

CVs, it’s suggested, can’t always be trusted – and are full of information that is no longer relevant.

But take all of this with a pinch of salt.

The Tech Hiring Survey points to a very different future – and it’s absolutely possible that CVs in their traditional format will become obsolete.

But as with many surveys, the phrasing is vital. Respondents ‘are open’ to removing CVs from the recruitment process. In all likelihood, those same respondents will still be asking for candidates to upload CVs within their own processes.

The most enlightening insight from the latest survey is actually about the accelerating focus on non-academic backgrounds. It’s very positive that the tech sector is moving rapidly in this direction – and other sectors need to follow suit.

Otherwise, those hard-to-find candidates are going to become even harder to find.

And even more fundamentally, the survey’s latest findings simply illustrate how hard search firms are working to find candidates.

From growth in contingency roles, to an even sharper acceleration in recruiters hiring internationally for domestic jobs, recruiters are doing everything they can to keep things moving.

In 2022, it will be more of the same. And that will bring great success to the search firms that are able to solve the candidate problem.