Why Stop Worrying about Perfect CV?

As long I’ve seen and been in IT business (20 years), there’s been a few funny aspects in the trade. One is buzzwords, the other is your CV (Curriculum vitae).

If I had to bet on one of these disappearing, it would be the CV.

I’m perfectly honest: I am developing a recruit system which prefers showing talent and intelligence instead of showing a polished CV.

Buzzwords are a story of their own. In technical fields such as IT, buzzwords are both an effective way to communicate about specific aspects of a project: BPM for business process management, ITIL for Information Technology Infrastructure Library and so on. 2FA is quite a household term nowadays (2-factor authentication = improved security for users by making a system require two known green flags from the user before letting them in to the system).

CV polishing is basically about two things:

You have to write in a flawless and concise way, in order to pass a possible AI scanner at the recruiting end. Recruiters use very commonly software to automate parts of the hiring process. One of the key technologies is a lexical parser of sorts; it’s a software that reads your CV, and interprets it using matching and a set of rules. The parser tries to understand what you are saying in the CV, without human assistance.

The second thing about CV polishing is meant for the human reader. Simply put: we love aesthetic things. We are fond of beauty. A bed-head CV which has jumpy indentation, illogical ordering of paragraphs, haphazard semantics and a poor level of spelling and/or punctuation will be left behind. People get the digital first impression based on the looks of your CV.

Why would the CV disappear?

I said earlier that CV is likely to disappear. At least more likely than buzzwords. Why?

• buzzwords actually pack concise information in a short form (3, 4 or 5 letters)
• the industry tends to standardize the buzzwords so that after some hovering around, for example, the letters “GSM” become to mean our mobile network system — for everyone. So people get a useful shorthand form, a “tool” of sorts, from buzzwords and abbreviations
• CV on the other hand does also contain information, but the way it has come to be used in recruiting, is a bit like a chameleon

Think about it:

• first you write (and color) and apply format to a CV
• you submit the CV document along with the job application
• a system receives the file, makes a virus scan on it, and puts in onwards to both a software and the recruiting person
• the AI reading your CV indexes and scores you based on what it finds and understand in the document
• the recruiter spends time reading and also interpreting what your CV communicates

You’re putting effort on to waste somebody else’s time. The receiving end however is often semi-obliged to ask and read the CV. Not always, though.

Back in the days (oh, god, I’m getting old) people hired people much more based on the jist of it. Nowadays we actually have all the bells and whistles to make the obligatory CV ceremony disappear.

Are you in?