CVs do not matter
I work in IT and I do recruitment for my department. Not too often, but regularly. And in different countries. The process is typical: we post a job opening, receive many CVs, filter them out and select the best ones, then do interviews. What strikes me again and again is that in most CVs most of things are lies.
The understanding, that existing recruitment process is broken and does not contribute to the goal of hiring the best employees, is not new. But most of us (99,9%?) keep doing that. That’s definitely not a good sign of our intelligence.
So, what is wrong with CVs and resumes?
Normally I am looking for several things in them:
- required sills and competences
- experience to prove them
- ability to learn new things
The assumption that you could find the realistic and trustworthy answers in CVs is fully overestimated because of one simple reason — the people do not put truth in them. They want to have a chance to be invited, a chance to get job, and they just use CVs as a way to describe a better-self.
I always pick up couple of technical skills from a candidate’s CV and just start asking questions. In most cases, the candidates either can’t answer basic questions from the area of interest, or they are much worse, then they think and describe in their CVs.
Here is an example from the recent interview for a technical position. A candidate, directly after graduation, has indicated as his skills several programming languages:C++, C#, Java.
As I found out, this candidate has attended 2-week courses and his only knowledge is that those languages are used in software development.
And this is not the only case. It is the typical one. The problem is that the whole recruitment process is not cheap, you waste your time and resources.
So, I am asking myself, why do we need CVs? What is the better alternative?
