CV screening's ability to predict who'll actually perform in a role has always been weak, and that's not a criticism of you lovely, patient CV-screeners, but with the actual metrics being analysed. And the rise of AI-generated applications has only made it weaker. If you're hiring graduates or early-career candidates specifically, a CV will tell you almost nothing useful about who to shortlist.
For low-volume hiring of experienced or senior candidates, reading a CV carefully still makes sense. But even then job knowledge tests are far more useful. There's a narrow use case for CVs, and it's not for screening as there are better tools available.
The data on CV screening has never been encouraging
A CV is kind of just a marketing document. The candidate writes it, edits it, and presents the version of themselves they most want you to see.
And the research reflects this when it comes to the validity of CVs. Schmidt, Oh, and Schaffer's analysis of a hundred years of selection method research found that a candidate's education only had a 0.1 correlation with job performance (on a scale from 0 to 1). Years of experience had only a correlation of 0.07.
Both of these metrics were categorised as "unlikely to be useful". Which is not good news if you're using them as your primary filter.
You may be using CVs for checking hard requirements such as certain qualifications, right to work, minimum years of experience. Having those requirements is perfectly fine, but there's no need for them to live in a CV or be checked during CV screening. Those should be part of the application form where candidates who don't meet the minimum requirements are automatically filtered out.
For early-career hiring, a CV has almost nothing to say
This is where CV screening falls apart most completely, and it matters because early-career and graduate hiring is exactly where most volume sits.
Think about what a 21-year-old's CV actually contains. A degree, maybe a part-time job or two, a handful of extracurriculars if they've been advised to pad it out. Every candidate in your pipeline looks roughly the same on paper, and the ones who look slightly better are often just the ones who've had better advice about how to write a CV, or who've had access to more polished work experience (in my teenage years, most "internships" were secured by what connections your parents had - not how much you had to offer).
When there's so little to differentiate between candidates, you end up latching onto things that feel meaningful but aren't: the prestige of a university, the familiarity of a company name, the general polish of the layout. A typo becomes evidence of low attention-to-detail/verbal ability, or a generic list of hobbies or interests shows a lack of creativity. These are very unpredictive metrics.
And we don't like to admit it, but when you're making quick judgements across dozens of near-identical applications, unconscious bias will play a hand in some of those decisions. The study by Bertrand and Mullainathan springs to mind, that found that CVs with white-sounding names received 50% more callbacks than identical CVs with African American-sounding names. The exact same qualifications and experience, but a different name at the top.
AI has made this worse across the board
Around half of job seekers are now using AI to write their CVs (Financial Times, 2024), and that's only the ones willing to admit it. Applications that might previously have looked obviously thin now arrive polished and keyword-heavy, making them harder to tell apart and easier to mistake for strong candidates.
What you're reading to understand a candidate is increasingly a reflection of how well they can prompt ChatGPT rather than who they actually are.
Again, for early-career hiring, this makes an already difficult job considerably harder as there wasn't much in those CVs to go on in the first place.
CVs still have a place for lower volume, experienced hires
I've been fairly critical of CV screening (sorry if you're a fan), but for low-volume hiring of experienced or senior candidates it's still a useful tool.
If you're hiring a head of finance or a senior engineering lead and you're reviewing five or ten applications, the CV tells you something real. The arc of someone's career, the scale of the organisations they've worked in, the progression of their responsibilities, specific achievements that suggest they can do what you need. A senior hire's track record is verifiable and meaningful in a way that a graduate's simply isn't.
Even then, use it as context for a conversation rather than a verdict. How long they were in different roles and companies doesn't tell you how they performed. Job knowledge tests are actually a more useful metric (validity of 0.48) as it's the candidate's demonstrated accrued knowledge.
Ability testing is the best screening tool, providing something CV sifting never could
The 2016 study I've been quoting for a lot of this article actually looked at over 30 selection methods. So not only did it discover which methods underperform (like CV metrics), it also found which methods are the most effective.
Coming out top of the list was general mental ability (GMA), which is what ability assessments measure. The validity of GMA was 0.65. Don't worry too much if statistics aren't your thing, but in simple terms: on a scale of 0 to 1 (where 1 is perfect prediction and 0 is no correlation) 0.65 is very high and much higher than the metrics for CVs around 0.1.
In human, non-numerical terms, cognitive ability test measures someone's capacity to learn, reason, and problem-solve. Those things matter whether someone is 21 or 41, and are the reason for their continued success in a role, and can't be faked with a polished ChatCV-me (new term I've just this second coined).
Conclusion and next steps
CV screening isn't going away overnight, and for senior hires in small numbers it still earns its place. But as a default shortlisting method for early-career and volume hiring, it never had the predictive power people assumed it did.
We work with a lot of early-career hiring teams at Test Partnership, and the shift away from CV screening to ability tests tends to change things pretty quickly. Instead of trying to find meaningful differences between applications that all look the same, teams get actual data on candidate capability from day one of the process. It gets better people into the interview room, and it does it faster.
We break down the best alternatives to CV screening in another article. And if you're hiring graduates and want to understand what a better process looks like, take a look at our early careers hiring guide.
Joshua Hancock
Digital Marketing Manager at Test Partnership. Over 7 years experience as a writer, content strategist, SEO and digital marketer.
