Ask HN: Why are we still using CVs like old times?

I’m also handling the interviewing process at a small company and I’m completely confused as to what you are having a problem with. How else would you do your first round of filtering without something like a CV? Is there a format you think would be better?

Honestly I care very little about how the CV is laid out/formatted. As long as I can parse (with my eyeballs) your work history, dates, and the tech you used then I have enough to make my decision.

The only CV that almost made me reject the candidate outright was a pdf that was not searchable. I’ll read the full CV of everyone I actually interview but if you don’t have at least some tech overlap with the stack I’m hiring for (or equivalent, such as I’m looking for Vue but if you have recent Angular/React then we will be fine) then I’m not going to waste my or your time.

If I can’t ctrl+f in your resume then you’ve failed.

If people can't format a CV, they'd likely not fit self-selection for what I need.

If companies insist on filling in a web template, my experience is they have inflexible ERP systems and I'd rather not work there so I don't demand that either.

A CV's fine. I also print them. It costs less than $0.10 per page. How 1993.

There was an HRXML spec back in the semweb era, I've always wondered what happened with that.

CVs are fine, alternatives are Linkedin, which are basically a digitalized version of a CV.

It's ok to sort through CVs, unless you are getting spammed, everyone behind a CV is a person and deserves some attention. There are many tools that help you do that as well.

I just use my LinkedIn profile as a CV. If for some reason they want a PDF copy, I just use the export to PDF functionality.

I have gotten feedback from many recruiters that I have an awesome profile, and some use it as an example to show others how to build theirs.

What is so different about 2024 such that CVs are no longer applicable?

Are you a human (being hired to work with humans), or an API?

It's just information in one place, not necessarily paper style CVs. Of course companies need the candidate information. I have complemented my CVs with a website with more detailed info in the past, for example. My thinking is providing as much information as possible and also a summary of it which would be the CV itself.

Style doesn’t matter much for recruiters tbh, many use tools to scan keywords and years of experience from text

I do that in big tech too for ~100s of CVs per role, what's the big deal ? The alternative seems to be for me to lose control over who I want to work with to algorithms or people with less context

The future is 100 page CVs! Why? You feed them to an LLM/RAG on the other end, whack it into the hiring company’s system prompt and the rating in stars is spat out the other end.

The future is 100 page CVs! Why? You feed them to an LLM/RAG on the other end, whack it into the hiring company’s system prompt and the rating in stars is spat out the other end.

maybe a voice assistant that represents the candidate, but does the reviewer have time to play around with them?

it is likely that the CVs would be correctly formatted - should candidates be given a link to the template of the correct CV?