CVs are dead

Leonardo da Vinci first produced a curriculum vitae in 1482. Since the 1950s, CVs have become widely standardised and commonplace for job applications across the world.

As someone who has hired hundreds of people and interviewed thousands across several countries, I can tell you: for a long time now, CVs have been borderline useless for hiring managers. Because what is a CV? It's a list of companies you've worked for, with some of the tasks you executed and your achievements. Maybe. Many candidates bend the truth a bit, hoping interviewers won’t dig too deep - and to be fair, many interviewers don’t.

Throughout the user research we’ve done for Wolven, we asked hiring managers, founders, TAs and recruiters all kinds of questions. But one answer shocked us the most (but also didn’t shock us…)

How long do you spend on each CV before you make a decision?

The answer: 5-8 seconds.

That’s how long candidates have to stand out. How? Have a big tech name on your CV. Or the exact programming language the company uses. Or the necessary finance certification. Your only chance is to have a crystal ball that tells you what the 10-or-so magic words are that the decision maker that day will want to see. Not to mention that many decisions at CV stage are made by recruiters or TAs, not the respective industry experts for the role. Good luck.

You’re a graduate? Congrats. You have no way at all to separate yourself from your peers. Decision makers can only go by your grades and the university you attended. Hardly strong indicators of success, value fit, ability in the workplace, or smarts. And again, through no fault of your own. You’re not given a system/environment in which you can truly present yourself.

However, I’m not blaming the hiring managers either here. Over the last few years I hired 1 out of 400 applicants, on average. In certain roles the ratio was even worse. This was due to low quality, low signal, and simply far too many applications for each role. The latter has been severely amplified in recent months due to AI agents creating and submitting applications.

So what do you do when the only piece of evidence you’ve got is a slightly inflated document, written in the same style across all candidates, likely even written by the same one or two AIs, with very little signal, and you have another 500 of these to go through today? You do exactly what we found in our research. Spot checking and hoping for the best.

So what?

We thought long and hard about how to help both candidates and employers, as both sides are getting a bad deal with the current situation.

We could use AI to assess the CVs, right? No.

We spent a lot of time building a next-gen version of that, far superior to what’s currently on the market. But we threw it away entirely. Because building better AI systems to judge CVs written by other AIs is simply duct tape for a broken process. And an arms race.

We could use AI interviews, so candidates have a chance to present themselves without taking up interviewers’s time! No.

Again, we built a next-gen pipeline for AI interviews. Made it very natural, conversational, and friendly, with deep follow-ups. Then we completely scrapped it. Because candidates universally hate being interviewed by an AI. Doesn’t matter how good the AI process is. You want to have a human in front of you. See/feel their emotions, their facial expressions etc. Even if it’s a remote call. And that applies to both sides. Plus, by putting candidates through an AI interview you’re virtually guaranteed to lose some (of the best) applicants.

What we need is this: back to human-first hiring. The only way to find real gems - and I’d like to think I’ve found many in my time as a hiring manager - is through human judgement and digging deep. AI can help support the process behind the scenes to save time. But…

Humans hire humans

That’s why we’re building the next version of Wolven around human judgement, high signal throughout the entire process, deeper interactions, and AI as a helpful aide rather than the be-all and end-all of hiring in 2026 and beyond.