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Listen Hard to Hear the Death Knell of the Professionally Written C.V.

By Robert Price of Sell Yourself Recruitment Limited

A professionally written C.V. is by another name a cheat. These C.V.‘s underline the fundamental failings of the traditional recruitment process because their intention is to disguise the individuals they purport to represent. They do not mirror individuals or exhibit what individuals can accomplish with the written word, the means by which we all communicate, because THOSE individual did not write them.

A true reflection of an individual and their ability to genuinely write about themselves can only be accomplished by the individual actually doing the writing. Employers are deluged with third party scripts that do not mirror the people they are meant to represent. No wonder then that companies invite the wrong people to be interviewed for vacancies and miss the real ‘gems’ because the ‘gems’ wrote their own C.V.

It is difficult to understand how this deceit has become an accepted ‘norm’ in the recruitment process, but it is not hard to understand why good people get missed while sometimes the ‘wrong’ people are employed. Companies who truly value their staff will always appreciate that it is ultimately their people who will engineer the future development of their business. It is for that reason that the importance of the C.V. in truly reflecting an individual should have been played more honestly in the traditional recruitment process. It is a failing of our current recruitment process that has caused this deceit to take hold. Over many years and for the wrong reason, we have all been engineered into accepting that people may present themselves on paper in a fashion that does not necessarily reflect who they really are.

The future of traditional recruitment is however about to change in today’s more sophisticated technological environment. The deceitful, professionally, written C.V. has passed its sell-by-date and because of a change in the concept of recruitment that is gradually sweeping around the world via the Internet, is about to be committed to the waste bin.

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Sell Yourself Recruitment
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I think it is the failure of management rather than the job applicant, though, because all management would have to do is have each potential employee come in ahead of the interview to sit down and take a monitored written exam in defense of the CV, with no notes allowed. It would be easy enough to compare the writing skills (and spelling!) of the applicant with the phony CV.

But so many companies now are not interested in the skills and knowledge and leadership capability of their applicants, but more in political correctness. For example, one person I know who was absolutely the best qualified for a high-ranking position was passed over because of a rumor that he had breakfast with the person he would be replacing.

I agree with you that internal politics definitely plays a part within any company or government institution and, for that reason a CV will have little impact if your face doesn’t fit.
However, where several hundred external applicants tender for a job, a company has little room to manoeuvre other than to rely on traditional recruitment agencies to sift out the chaff in order to whittle the numbers down to a manageable candidacy. Even then reliance on recruitment agencies in this manner is costly, which is why we are seeing moves by many companies towards using their own Human Resources (HR) to do the sifting for them. This is when an individual CV needs to stand out and those written professionally are designed to do so. The reason we challenge professionally written CVs was initiated by feedback received from more than 200 companies that claimed many professionally written CVs did not properly reflect the individuals they represented.
It is easy to blame the failure of companies finding the best person for a job simply because they select the best looking CVs presented them. Yet this does highlight just how significant a CV has become. It is a major reason we have stepped away from using the CV and created a more realistic mechanism by which employers can genuinely assess candidates in a virtual environment that they can access 24/7.

A Curriculum Vitae (CV) is a documentary summary of an individual’s life and academic qualifications. In the traditional recruitment arena it is the first document that a potential employer receives from a job seeker. The philosophy behind the CV is that it should provide employers with a means to screen applicants in order to identify those with the most appropriate qualifications and experience to fill a vacancy.
This article was written to explain the fallibity of the CV written by a paid professional and how this type of CV can work against both employers and rival candidates.

Companies that are so short sighted as to rely upon CVs in their recruitment, interview and selection process are lacking some very basic leadership.

Occasionally I see companies asking for CVs but what they are looking for is a basic list of achievements to ensure that they interview only those people who should, at least, be able to demonstrate a level of education, be it school leaving certificate or a doctorate.

Embroidery in CVs is a definite warning alarm for any company looking for staff.

With the employment market as wide open as it is, employers are no longer doing the head-hunting - the heads are hunting them and they can afford to be more selective in the initial sorting process.

The REAL discerning employers are not interested in what you have done in the past - they want to know what you will do in the future. After all, with such a glowing CV, why are you looking for work?

We spent two years researching the recruitment practices adopted by many companies in several countries including Ireland and the UK. We discovered that reliance on the C.V. is given significant importance in the majority of companies and that the better the presentation format i.e. professionally written ones tended to be concise and very easily followed. This gave them more chance of being included in any selection. What we also identified was that those who submitted a personally created C.V. commonly wrote longer than necessary and therefore gave a reader with several dozen applications on their desk a burdensome task that resulted in a slimmer likelihood of their inclusion in any selection process.
This partly led to our conclusion that the C.V. written by a professional on behalf of someone is an unfair practice in a world where not everyone can afford the luxury.

"We discovered that reliance on the C.V. is given significant importance in the majority of companies"

I think your research must have been with companies that are formulaic. I regularly check employment adverts from France, Germany, Spain and UK and find that very few companies ask for a CV.

It is becoming more common for a hand written letter of application to be requested, although it is still not the norm.

Often more importance is given to a request for at least two testimonials from previous employers although, again, it is not the norm.

I have noticed that there is also a move to minimum academic qualifications as a coarse filter of applicants.

It helps, of course, that most jobs seem to be subject to a three month trial period before full incorporation - THAT is eminently sensible.

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