Hiring practice5 min read
A CV is a claim. Hire on the evidence.
A CV is the candidate’s case for themselves, written by the candidate. Read it as a list of things to check, and the rest of your process gets easier.
Hiring practice5 min read
A CV is the candidate’s case for themselves, written by the candidate. Read it as a list of things to check, and the rest of your process gets easier.
Put this into practice on your next role.
Free for your first role. No card.
Write your must-haves before you open the first CV, and decide how you will check each one.
Move every must-have from “claimed” to “shown” to “watched” before the offer.
Most hiring starts with a pile of CVs and a feeling. Someone reads the pile and picks the ones that sound right. Those people are invited to talk, the conversation goes well or badly, and an offer follows the conversation.
The trouble is in the first step. A CV is the most carefully written document in the whole process, and the person who wrote it is the one being judged. That does not make it dishonest. It makes it a claim: the candidate’s case for themselves, written with every incentive to be persuasive.
You would not accept a supplier’s brochure as proof that the product works. A CV deserves the same treatment. It tells you what to check, not what is true.
A CV is good at some things. It tells you where someone has worked, what they were called, which tools they have been near, and how they choose to describe themselves. That is useful for a first sort.
It is bad at the things that matter most. It cannot tell you how well someone did the work, how much of a team’s result was theirs, or whether a skill listed in 2019 still holds. And it rewards a particular talent, writing a CV, which is rarely the job you are hiring for.
What a CV shows well
What a CV cannot show
Industrial psychologists have spent decades measuring how well different hiring methods predict later job performance. The most thorough recent review, by Paul Sackett and colleagues in 2022, pooled the published studies and corrected an error that had inflated some older estimates.
The ranking is not what most CV screening assumes. Here are approximate validities from that review, where 0 means no relationship with job performance and 1 would mean perfect prediction:
| Method | Approximate validity |
|---|---|
| Structured interviews | 0.42 |
| Job knowledge tests | 0.40 |
| Work sample tests | 0.33 |
| General cognitive ability tests | 0.31 |
| Unstructured interviews | 0.19 |
| Years of job experience | 0.07 |
Two things stand out. The first is how little years of experience tell you on their own, and that is the figure a CV displays most prominently. The second is that the methods at the top all involve watching someone do or explain the work, against questions you decided in advance.
The line on the CV that gets the most attention, years in the role, is one of the weakest predictors anyone has measured.
?Quick check
Quick check: in the 2022 review, which of these predicted job performance least well?
The fix is not to stop reading CVs. It is to decide, before you read any, what you need to know and how you will find it out. That order matters. Once you have read a CV you like, every later judgement bends toward it.
Write three to five must-haves
Things the person must do well in the first six months. “Can reconcile a month of transactions without supervision” is a must-have. “Detail-oriented” is not; you cannot check it.
Pick how each one will be shown
A short test, a work sample, a structured interview question, or a reference who saw the work. Every must-have gets one.
Use the CV only to sort
Does the person plausibly meet the must-haves? If yes, they go to the checks. The CV does not get a score of its own beyond that.
Decide on what was shown
At the end, lay the evidence for each must-have side by side. The candidate with the best CV and the candidate with the best evidence are often different people.
A useful way to think about each skill is as a ladder with three rungs.
You will not get every skill to the top rung, and you do not need to. But for the three or four that decide whether the hire works, you want to have watched. An offer made on claims alone is a bet on the quality of a document.
Deciding on evidence is not only more accurate. It is fairer, because a CV carries far more than skill. It carries which school someone could afford, which companies would interview them, and how well they learned the conventions of CV writing. A person who taught themselves and never worked for a famous name looks weaker on paper and may be stronger in fact.
When every candidate is asked to show the same things in the same way, those differences stop deciding the outcome. You are no longer comparing documents. You are comparing work.
Hiring on evidence: 0 of 5 read
Up next · Part 2
How to write a job description people finish reading
Most job descriptions are a wish list with a company history on top. The ones that attract the right people are shorter, more specific, and print the salary.
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Most job descriptions are a wish list with a company history on top. The ones that attract the right people are shorter, more specific, and print the salary.