An interesting blog post was added recently to ere.net about the future (or not) of CVs. It's something that's very much interesting to me as I've long watched a general trend for the CV to be pushed out of many parts of recruitment process, and in some cases be pushed out altogether. In the traditional agency business model, it always seems odd that in many cases recruiters I know barely look at the CV, instead looking at and relying more on parsed data (which in turn can be converted into a standardly structured document of course) - however at the very end of this process, often it's still the original CV that gets pushed out to the client/employer.
As well as the parsing technologies that have changed things in this area, we have online profiles such as LinkedIn and Xing which can form "living CVs" displaying blog posts, latest deals made and projects worked on etc.. In addition to this now, we have video CVs being used more and more. Of course there are major limits to the effectiveness of relying purely on a video CV, including lack of ability to automatically filter based on parsed data, inability to pull out profile "highlights" into a list of search results, and a lowered ability to search these in general. I've seen some people state clearly that video CVs will replace any written CV/form completely - this is not going to happen, but the use of a video CV / videos interview to BACK UP a written profile is most definitely going to grow. From a jobseeker perspective on this, the ability to stand out from the crowd is essential. Therefore a format must be very enticing which allows you to show your expertise via professional blog posts / articles / portfolio, allows some of your personality to come through via your Twitter posts, and allows you to show off your presentational and communication skills via a video profile.
Another effort to push the CV document out as the general "currency" of the recruitment world are standardized formats to encode this information such as HRL XML (for storing and communicating CV data between systems) and hResume (similar in some ways, but general more focused on web systems communicating and scraping profile data). It is not the CV document itself that is bouncing around these systems and enabling them to work, but strcutured data that has been parsed out of the CV. However, often the somewhat redundant CV document still sits there alongside its more structured bigger brother.
In the agency world, I've heard debates banded back and forth many times about "will agencies allow candidates to simply apply via a LinkedIn profile rather than a CV?" - there are many points here, including whether LinkedIn profiles do yet contain full enough information for a true assessment to be made, however when we start to talk about recruitment within the mobile world where document storage is notoriously difficult, this kind of application may well be the only way to hook that candidate.
So in summary, what are your thoughts about the future of the written CV? Slowly dying or not? If on its way out, what do we feel is more likely to come to replace it both in the input side of things (how does a jobseeker submit their details?) and in the output side of things (what does the recruiter/employer actually use to make their decision at the end?). In the backbox "middle bit" of these systems, the humble CV document has mostly died a death quite a long time ago...
Oh - the original blog post is here: http://www.ere.net/2010/05/26/profiles-the-new-resume/
