The 9 Defining Characteristics of the CV of the Future

If you were to ask me today to leave the house, go to a store, rent a video, go home, watch it, and then go back to the store and return it, I would think you were living in another century. I wouldn’t even remember that was exactly how I used to do it myself not that long ago.

Let’s take dating as another example. Remember how online dating used to require filling out dozens if not hundreds of form fields about tastes and preferences to find your soulmate? Fast forward less than 10 years, and dating has become as simple as swiping a finger.

Compared to other areas, recruitment has not evolved as fast. This is especially true when it comes to CVs. We still use the same CV formats we did several decades ago. This creates a major issue in the first stage of the recruitment funnel. Recruiters spend a lot of time looking through CVs in order to decide whether to move on to the next one or dig deeper. In theory, a candidate writing a great CV can save us a lot of time. However, the time is not really being saved as much as transferred from recruiters to candidates. In reality, then, the problem is still not solved.

Let us speculate about what the CV of the future could look like:

1. Time-Centric

Time is a crucial part of a CV, so we can assume that rather than a long document of text, the CV of the future will be a visual timeline. This would give us an immediate idea of how long a given experience was to better understand its relevance.

2. Relevant

Candidates will no longer have to customize each application, as the CV of the future will automatically show us only experiences and skills that are relevant to the position we are recruiting for. It will also showcase career-pivoting predictions.

3. Interactive

Digging deeper into a given section of a CV will allow recruiters to get more detailed and relevant info while keeping the first glance clean.

4. Metric-Oriented

Some of the best CVs I’ve seen have clear, tangible metrics — e.g., “Improved metric X with action Y.” The CV of the future could immediately provide clear values to key metrics.

5. Frictionless

Creating a CV in the future probably won’t require more than a few clicks or taps. Much of the detail will be automatically filled in by using the data already available on the web and/or through machine-learning predictions.

6. Transparent and Benchmarked

Expectations in terms of salary, company size, culture, living costs, and so on will be more transparent from the start, as well as being automatically benchmarked.

7. Localized

Automatic translation has come a long way, and there is no reason why we shouldn’t be able to see a CV in our preferred language without any effort by the candidate, especially if most information is structured. We can also assume the CV of the future will automatically adapt itself to each country’s practices and common ways of doing things.

8. Personal

Reducing time spent on the initial screening stages of sourcing will increase the available time for recruiters to personalize their approaches, which would, as stated above, automatically be more relevant. This is also true for candidates: less time manually filling the blanks and more time for your “About Me” section.

9. Private

Privacy is becoming increasingly crucial. There is no reason to think the CV of the future should contain personal info such as name, picture, or contact details until a connection has been agreed to by both parties. The CV of the future will be focused on your profession, not your background or identity. This would also be enormously beneficial for privacy compliance.

The great news is that many companies have been trying to disrupt the recruitment industry for a while now. From Google launching a Cloud Jobs API  to Amazon creating (and then dumping ) its own AI recruitment tool, things are definitely moving forward. After all, the first stage of progress is experimentation, regardless of how crazy the experiments may be.

One notable app launched in 2018 with the mission statement of “Creating the CV of the Future” is CV Timeline, which also just launched a free Chrome extension that automatically creates an interactive timeline of any LinkedIn Profile. The adoption of this app could provide crucial insights to validate some of the speculations and assumptions we’ve made in this article.

Marcin Smolinski is CEO of cvtimeline.com, building the CV of the future, and the founder of Toolbox for HR — tech recruitment team for rent.

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