Recruiting without a CV: between the evolution of the recruitment market and the opportunity to stand out!

The CV is seen today as an essential tool in the recruitment process. It is the primary point of contact between the candidate and the recruiter, and sometimes the last when the candidate’s “CV” is rejected.

But do recruiters really still need a CV to recruit?

Recruitment methods without CVs

To shake up traditional recruitment, some companies are exploring new avenues by launching CV-free recruitment initiatives, such as Adecco, McDonalds, Ikea, Lyreco and companies in the automotive sector.

In France more specifically, there are methods of recruitment without a CV, practiced in two ways:

• Pôle emploi, which has implemented the MRS method (Method of Recruitment by Simulation) to evaluate the skills required for the position.
• APEC offers another method which consists of sending candidates a questionnaire specific to the position to be filled. Its objective is to evaluate skills, interpersonal skills and motivation.

More generally, we are still often recruiting with a mandatory cover letter. For example, I recently saw an ad in a RATP bus with the mention CV & LM required for a driver position.

With that introduction in mind, and before getting to the heart of the matter, I’d like to give you a brief overview of the state of the art in the recruitment function.

The experience of the employee in the recruitment process without a CV

In a recruitment market marked by a Stop & Go and above all a “war/retention of Talents”, the balance of power between the company and the candidate seems to be reversed or at least rebalanced. Attracting talent without asking for their resume is a warning sign to confirm this trend. Looked at another way, this enables a company to cut recruitment times considerably, bearing in mind that studies and figures vary on the time spent by a recruiter reading a candidate CV and deciding whether or not to act on it: on average, this time is estimated at between 1mn40 and 3 mn.

We’re talking about a paradigm shift here: we need to attract candidates and consider them in the same way as we approach customers, by focusing on the “Customer Experience in the recruitment process”.

The same applies internally for company employees, where the aim is to retain employees. In this case, we speak of Employee Experience. Still making the analogy with Marketing, building customer loyalty means offering new attractive services/products, treating them properly… For the employee, it means for example offering new career paths or functional/geographical mobility, taking an interest in QWL so that they feel good in their work, etc.

CV-free recruitment: risk or opportunity?

To answer this question, we must analyze several elements:

The company that recruits

1. Size: SMEs and VSEs don’t necessarily have the resources to process large volumes of applications and to afford high-performance HR tools to automate the selection of candidates, and therefore the CV.
2. Your sector of activity: some shortage jobs (driver/delivery person/salesperson, etc.) don’t really require a CV, but rather soft skills.

Job type

For positions where mass recruitment is very common, it may be appropriate to dispense with the CV. Nevertheless, for certain sensitive senior management positions, the CV will remain essential to assess the relevance of the candidate’s background to the position, and especially to the criticality of the position within the organization.

The applicant who applies

The CV is a personal marketing tool for the candidate, but especially so when he or she has had a substantial career.

For a Junior profile, the CV boils down to the diploma, which is not necessarily a concrete factor in the recruiter’s decision as to the suitability of the position, even though some French companies give preference to graduates of certain engineering or business schools when recruiting their profiles.

A CV remains a document whose information must be verified… so why not do it in an interview with a more human contact. There is also a bias induced by the recruiter when processing resumes, with the risk of discrimination. Hence the emergence of the “Blind Recruitment” approach where personal information is excluded from the CV.

The digital recruitment ecosystem

Sourcing methods vary widely: Job board, LinkedIn, and other social networks. If we look more specifically at LinkedIn, its strength lies in the following aspects:

• Dynamic: compared to a CV, which is frozen in time, a LinkedIn profile moves, experience is updated, and the candidate can add information not found on a CV: soft skills/recommendations/centers of interest…
• Without GDPR constraints compared to the CV where there is a 2-year retention period for personal data.
• Unlimited profile pool for a wide range of profiles, with a worldwide geographic location.
• Free for the candidate, allowing him/her to match with companies that were not in the radar of his/her research, offering him/her career evolutions based on skills. If the recruiter uses this matching in his HRIS (paying option), this could represent a real opportunity for both parties.

On this last point, we are increasingly seeing HCM solutions such as Oracle interfacing with LinkedIn to retrieve similar profiles from the HRIS database, or enabling candidates to apply using their LinkedIn profile instead of their CV.

In short, recruiting without a CV can be a real opportunity to meet the recruitment challenges of 2022 and those of the future.

Find out more about our HRIS solutions

Some techniques to make your recruitment without a CV successful

Knowing your values: SQORUS, for example, supports its customers in HR projects of this type, helping them to define, understand and promote their corporate values.

• Implement Assessment/Video Interview solutions.
• Standardize your processes using an ATS solution.
• And others, depending on your business needs…

In conclusion, recruiting without a CV is an HR strategy that forms part of a fully-fledged HR & HRIS project, requiring a preliminary study on 4 main levels:

1. Process & Organization: how to readjust the candidate selection process? How to restructure my teams and my sourcing strategy?
2. Business: what will it bring to HR business teams?
3. SI: How to manage the application in the ATS?
4. Change management: how to support HR teams and managers in changing this practice.

Find out more about our HR Council and Strategy offer

If you’re interested in CV-free recruitment and would like to receive support in this process, please contact us.

See also our feature on "HR strategy management tools".

• What are the key issues facing HR departments today?
• Organization, talent management, recruitment: priority HR projects?
• Human resources management: what HR strategies for the future?
• Best practices to manage your HR strategy in an optimal way
• The different HR management tools to carry out your HR strategy
• HRIS software: the different areas of intervention for the HR function
• How to convince your management to invest in an HRIS tool?
• Is it necessary to be accompanied in the management of an HR strategy?
• What indicators should be defined to measure the performance of an HR strategy?
• HR strategy: how to achieve effective HR reporting?
• Who should drive HR projects in the company?
• Setting up a working group for an HR project: who should be involved?