The CV Is Becoming Less Useful. What Should Replace It?

For decades, the CV has been one of the first things employers look at when assessing a candidate. It shows where someone has worked, what they've studied and, ideally, what they've achieved.

But AI is changing how useful that information really is. Candidates can now produce polished, tailored CVs in minutes — applications are becoming easier to create, but harder to tell apart.

So if a well-written CV no longer tells the whole story, what should employers be looking at instead?

 

Why Is the CV Losing Its Power?

The shift isn't just anecdotal. David Magnani, President of M&A Executive Search, points to skills-based hiring as one of the defining recruiting trends of 2026 — a move away from hiring people based on their educational background or job history. 

The numbers back him up: 85% of employers now use skills-based hiring, up from 81% the year before, and 53% have dropped degree requirements entirely  more than double the 30% who had just a year earlier. When the majority of employers are already moving past credentials on paper, a polished CV alone stops being a meaningful differentiator.

 

What Does a CV Actually Fail to show?

A CV tells employers what a candidate says they can do. But there's a real difference between claiming a skill and demonstrating it. Some ways to close that gap:

• Structured interviews — consistent questions and scenarios across candidates reveal how people think, communicate and respond under pressure.

 

• Work-sample assessments — rather than asking about experience, give candidates a chance to show it: analysing data, preparing a presentation, solving a real problem.

 

• Skills portfolios — campaigns, designs, projects, reports — tangible evidence of capability that a bullet point can't fake.

 

• Evidence of outcomes — there's a real gap between "managed digital marketing campaigns" and showing the measurable results those campaigns delivered.

 

• Practical tasks — short, relevant exercises reveal how someone approaches a problem, not just how well they present on paper.

 

• Referrals — as AI makes applications easier to produce, a recommendation from someone who's actually worked with a candidate becomes more valuable, not less.

 

Is This Just Recruiting catching Up to What's Already True?

In many ways, yes. Recruitment platform RChilli frames it plainly: companies increasingly care more about skills and performance than about where someone went to school or what their job title used to be. AI hasn't invented this shift — it's accelerated it, by making the old signal (a well-written CV) too easy to produce and too unreliable to trust on its own.

 

So, Is the CV Dead?

Not necessarily. The CV still offers useful context — a quick overview of someone's career, experience and qualifications. But perhaps it's time to stop treating it as the evidence, and start treating it as the starting point.

The future of recruitment likely combines the CV with stronger evidence of capability:

• What has this person actually done?
• How do they approach problems?
• What can they produce?
• What outcomes have they delivered?

AI may make it easier to create a convincing application. That makes it more important than ever for employers to build processes that assess capability, not just presentation.

 

The Real Question

It isn't whether the CV will disappear. It's whether the CV will still be enough.

What should employers lean on more — CVs, interviews, practical tasks, referrals, portfolios, or evidence of outcomes? Tell us where you land.