When Every CV Gets Better, Hiring Gets Harder

Something odd is happening in hiring. A candidate can send out a CV that reads better while the hiring manager receiving it finds it harder to see who they are.

I can see why candidates use AI, looking for work is difficult, and making your experience sound clear is sensible. But the candidate sees one improved CV, the manager sees it alongside hundreds of others. People with different histories using the same polished language, so much so, that hiring managers I speak to are now noticing identical sentences across applications. I wasn't hearing that a year ago.

Recruiters have said hiring is broken for years, what's changing now is the combination of more applications and less understanding in each one.

How the problem got worse

Job boards made vacancies easier to find, Easy Apply removed much of the effort of applying, employers received more CVs and added filters to cope and candidates, often hearing nothing back, applied more widely. Now they also have generic AI to help them rewrite their experience for each role.

Each choice makes sense. If software reads your CV before a person does, you want to meet its criteria, and if hundreds apply to your vacancy, you need a way to reduce the pile.

Together, those choices create a cycle. More applications bring more filtering, more filtering encourages more optimisation and silence prompts candidates to apply more broadly. By the time a shortlist reaches a hiring manager, the CVs may use the right language but still say too little about how each person works. Someone who could do the job may have disappeared at an earlier stage.

Processing volume was already a problem, but now I hear managers struggling with the next question: I have a shortlist, but who can solve the problem behind this vacancy?

Meanwhile, the role remains open and its work is spread across the team. The manager needs to hire quickly but has less confidence in the evidence in front of them. That is the damage I am seeing, and if this loop keeps accelerating, I worry about a crash in our ability to make good hiring decisions.

Founders and smaller employers are beginning to ask how to assess people differently, because another filter will not tell them what they need to know. One employer is starting a trial with us on a live vacancy. It is early, but that willingness to change the process is what I am watching.

What the CV cannot tell you

For 20 years as a headhunter, I was paid to look beyond a CV. I would find out what a business needed done, then ask candidates about comparable problems they had tackled. Their decisions, the difficulties they faced and what changed as a result were often why I recommended a meeting. That way of asking questions now shapes our work with job seekers at Hike.

Richard is one of the people we helped there. A sales professional in the US, he had spent 18 months out of work without an interview before we worked on his CV. It said he had exceeded his sales target. That was true, but it sounded like a line on almost any sales CV. When I asked how he had done it, he described a $350,000 client account across multiple sites. He had found the decision maker, worked out what different locations needed and helped recover the account after goods meant for several sites were delivered to one.

Those details made it possible to see the candidate who was there all along. We drew out that account and other examples, then rebuilt his CV. He began getting recruiter interviews and has since landed a business development role with a staffing company. He told me the CV help was crucial. I cannot know which detail led to the offer, but I know how much of his experience the original CV concealed.

Turn the old inquiry into a digital process

I believe the way to arrest this cycle is to use technology to bring the depth of analogue headhunting into digital hiring. For too long, we have bolted more reach, speed and filters onto the old process. Modern technology can ask better questions and make the answers useful when a decision is made.

At Hike, we call the first step CV to PV: Personality Vitae. I mean the person revealed through their actual choices, actions and results, in language they can stand behind. A candidate starts with their CV and a real vacancy. JobFit helps them consider whether it is worth pursuing. We are testing a guided process that draws out their own evidence for that role and shows why it matters to the employer. The inquiry I used with Richard is what we are working to put into the product.

That evidence needs to work at both stages. A candidate needs to get through the first screen, and the person reading the shortlist needs to understand them. Relevant language helps with the first. Specific, firsthand examples make the second possible.

The deeper opportunity depends on information a generic model does not have: what the candidate actually did, what the company needs done and what both learn from the outcome. People have to provide that knowledge, correct it and make the decisions. Technology can help gather and connect it. This proprietary signal, supplied by the people involved, can help a manager decide whom to meet with more confidence now. As experiences and outcomes are added over time, it could improve the next decision about a person's career or a company's team, and then the one after that. That is where the effect compounds.

The live vacancy trial asks whether a manager can notice people they might otherwise overlook, reach a sound decision faster and feel more confident about it. We will learn more when someone is doing the job.

The companies that change how they gather this information first may start seeing people their competitors filter out. For candidates, it could make applying more purposeful and show the work they have really done. Hiring needs a way to understand people well enough to decide.