Is The CV Slowly Dying?

For decades, the CV has been at the centre of the recruitment process. Whether you're applying for your first job or moving into a senior position, the process has remained fairly familiar: update your CV, send it to an employer and hope there's enough on those two pages to secure an interview.

That's still how most recruitment works today, but the role of the CV is beginning to change. AI has made it easier than ever for candidates to produce polished applications, while employers have access to more ways of assessing someone's skills before making a hiring decision. The result is a recruitment process where the CV remains important, but increasingly acts as the starting point rather than the deciding factor.

For candidates, that means writing a good CV still matters. For employers, it means relying too heavily on one is becoming increasingly difficult when the document itself tells you less about the person who actually created it.

AI Has Changed What a Good CV Tells Us

A few years ago, there was a reasonable amount of effort involved in producing a strong CV. Candidates had to work out which experience was relevant, decide how to describe their achievements and tailor their application towards a particular vacancy. The quality of the finished document could therefore tell an employer something about how well that person communicated and understood the role they were applying for.

AI has complicated that considerably. Candidates can now give an AI tool their employment history and a job description and receive a professional, tailored CV within minutes. Used properly, this can be genuinely helpful, particularly for people who have plenty of relevant experience but struggle to put it into words. The problem starts when AI moves from helping somebody explain their experience to effectively writing their professional identity for them.

Employers are increasingly seeing the same phrases appearing across applications. Everyone seems to be results-driven, strategically minded and equipped with a proven track record, regardless of whether those descriptions actually tell you anything useful about the person. One of the 2026 articles included in our research describes this as "resume inflation", where the ability to create a polished, keyword-rich application has become so accessible that the finished CV is becoming less useful as a way of separating candidates.

That doesn't mean candidates should avoid using AI. We've previously looked at how to use AI in your job search without losing the human touch, and there are plenty of sensible ways it can improve an application. Candidates should simply remember that whatever appears on the page will eventually need to survive an interview. An AI-written CV that feels artificial can quickly become a problem when the person sitting in the interview sounds completely different from the person described in their application.

The CV Still Has an Important Job

With all the discussion around AI and new recruitment technology, it would be easy to assume employers are preparing to abandon CVs altogether. In reality, they're still one of the easiest ways to understand someone's career quickly, particularly when a vacancy attracts dozens or even hundreds of applications.

Research included in our sources found that 85% of respondents still considered CVs useful, largely because they provide a simple place to summarise someone's experience. The limitations became clearer when employers were asked what else a CV could tell them, with 40% saying they don't provide an accurate picture of someone's personality and 83% saying they don't accurately assess cultural fit.

Those findings get to the heart of the problem. CVs are good at telling employers where somebody has worked, how long they were there and what qualifications or experience they have. They're much less effective at showing how that person thinks, how they approach problems or how good they actually are at doing the work described on the page.

For many years, employers accepted that limitation because there wasn't a particularly practical alternative. If 200 people applied for a vacancy, reading their CVs was still considerably easier than interviewing all 200. That remains true today, which is why the CV is unlikely to disappear. What's changing is what employers expect to happen after they've read it.

Employers Are Looking for More Evidence

One of the clearest changes in recruitment is the growing emphasis on what candidates can demonstrate rather than what they can claim. Writing that you're an excellent project manager is easy, particularly when technology can help you phrase it perfectly. Explaining how you brought a delayed project back on schedule, what decisions you made and what happened as a result gives an employer considerably more information.

The same principle applies across different industries. A marketer can discuss campaign results, a designer can show previous work and an engineer can explain how they approached a technical problem. Someone working in construction or manufacturing may be able to demonstrate qualifications, tickets and experience on comparable projects. The evidence looks different depending on the job, but the purpose remains the same: employers want something that helps them understand whether the experience described on a CV translates into an ability to do the role.

This is one reason technical assessments, portfolios, practical tasks and competency-based interviews are becoming a bigger part of recruitment. Research into skills-based hiring points towards employers placing greater emphasis on assessments and real-world tests where they're appropriate for the role.

Portfolios are particularly useful in professions where previous work can easily be demonstrated. One of the articles included in our research describes the CV as a history document because it shows where somebody has worked and what they were broadly responsible for, while a portfolio can show how they approached problems, the decisions they made and what changed because of their work. The same idea can be applied more widely, even in jobs where a traditional portfolio wouldn't make sense.

Skills Are Becoming More Important Than the Job Title

This change is becoming more noticeable because the skills required within existing jobs are changing quickly. Someone could have ten years of experience in a profession and still work very differently from another candidate with the same number of years behind them, particularly when technology is changing how everyday tasks are completed.

Indeed's latest UK labour market update found that AI-related skills now appear in a record 9.4% of UK job adverts. What's particularly interesting is that this demand has moved well beyond traditional technology positions, with marketing, finance, HR and management roles increasingly asking for candidates who understand how AI can be used within their work.

Businesses aren't necessarily looking for AI specialists in every department. In many cases, they're looking for people who understand how to use new tools to work more effectively. Two candidates might therefore have almost identical employment histories and job titles, while one can demonstrate how they've used technology to improve a process, analyse information more quickly or reduce repetitive work.

A traditional CV can include those skills, but employers still need to establish whether the candidate genuinely understands them. As new technology becomes part of more jobs, practical examples and good interview questions become increasingly useful for separating someone who has added "AI" to their skills section from someone who actually knows how to use it.

Recruitment Is Becoming More Thorough

For employers, receiving more polished applications hasn't necessarily made recruitment easier. In some cases, it's created the opposite problem because larger numbers of candidates can appear suitable during the initial application stage.

That places more importance on the rest of the recruitment process. Interviews need to explore someone's individual contribution rather than repeating the information already available on their CV. Employers can ask candidates how they achieved a particular result, what problems they encountered and what they would do differently if they faced the same situation again. Where practical assessments make sense, they can provide another useful indication of someone's ability before an offer is made.

This doesn't mean every employer needs to introduce five interview stages and a three-hour assessment for every vacancy. Recruitment processes still need to be proportionate to the job, particularly when experienced candidates may have several opportunities available to them. The aim should be to collect enough evidence to make a good decision without turning an application into an endurance test.

It also means employers need to be careful about automatically favouring whichever candidate has produced the most impressive document. Older research into CV screening found that hiring managers can spend only a few seconds initially reviewing an application, often focusing on previous employers, education and particular keywords. When those keywords can now be added and optimised almost instantly, employers have even more reason to look beyond them before making a final decision.

What Does This Mean for Candidates?

For candidates, none of this is a reason to stop caring about your CV. Employers still use them, recruiters still ask for them and applicant tracking systems still rely on them, so producing a clear and relevant application remains one of the most important parts of a job search.

What is changing is how much work the CV can do on its own. Candidates should think about the evidence sitting behind the statements they make and be ready to explain it when an employer asks. Rather than filling a CV with broad descriptions about being hardworking or commercially minded, specific examples and measurable results give hiring managers something more useful to explore during an interview.

It can also help to keep a record of achievements while you're still in a role rather than trying to remember everything several years later. Projects completed, money saved, revenue generated, targets exceeded, processes improved and problems solved can all become useful evidence when you eventually move jobs. Where your profession allows it, keeping examples of previous work or building a portfolio can add another layer to the application.

Candidates using AI should take the same approach. Let it help organise your thoughts, improve awkward wording or identify areas of your experience worth highlighting, but make sure the finished CV still represents you. If you wouldn't naturally describe yourself as a "visionary cross-functional change leader" in an interview, it's probably worth questioning whether it belongs at the top of your CV either.

So, Is the CV Slowly Dying?

The CV isn't disappearing anytime soon. It's too useful as an initial recruitment tool and too deeply embedded in the way employers manage applications. What is changing is the amount of weight businesses are placing on those first couple of pages when deciding who the strongest candidate actually is.

AI has accelerated that change because polished applications are now easier to produce, making it harder to judge ability from presentation alone. At the same time, employers have more ways to assess candidates through interviews, portfolios, practical tasks, technical assessments and examples of previous work.

The most likely future isn't one where the CV disappears. It's one where it becomes the first part of a broader hiring process, giving employers enough information to decide who they want to learn more about before other forms of evidence begin to matter.

For candidates, a strong CV will still help open the door. Increasingly, though, what gets you through it will be your ability to prove that the experience written on the page matches what you can actually do.