9 Reasons To Replace CV Screening With Skills Assessments

Do You Want To Hire The Best CV Writer Or The Best Candidate?

Alooba is a skills assessment platform for data analytics & data science.

It feels like the humble CV has always been a part of the hiring process. da Vinci, among his more notable achievements, is actually credited with its creation in 1492. While we’re a big fan of da Vinci, we think this 500 year old archaic document needs to be sent straight to the parchment recycling bin.

‘Heresy! We’ve always screened CVs!’, we hear you yelling from your Covid-work-from-home offices. Before you burn us at the stake, check out these 9 reasons to replace your legacy CV screening with a fair skills assessment.

Here are 9 reasons to replace manually CV screening with skills assessments

Reason 1: 85% of candidates lie on their CV

Candidates often lie or exaggerate their skills on their CV. This makes them hard to take seriously and poor predictors of performance. By asking all candidates to take a fair skills based assessment to validate their skills.

Did you know? 93% of candidates believe they are above average.

Reason 2: Manual and costly to review

Screening CVs is time consuming and costly, increasing hiring costs and time to hire. Replace this legacy manual process with an automated skills assessment.

Reason 3: CV screening is biased against women

Because of ‘male overconfidence bias’ men will need a low threshold to include a skill on a CV, while women might need to feel very competent in it before they include it. Avoid a process biased against women by using a fair skills based assessment.

Did you know? White and male names are 13% more likely to receive callbacks on their CV.

Reason 4: Personal details revealed and highlighted

CVs normally contain and imply lots of irrelevant PII like gender, ethnicity, age and socioeconomic status. Replace CV screening with a skills assessment to avoid this unconscious bias.

Did you know? Unconscious bias cannot be removed through workshops.

Reason 5: An apples-to-oranges comparison

CVs are totally unstructured, and candidates can include or omit anything they want, making them impossible to compare. By using a skills assessment instead, you get a measurable apples-to-apples comparison of your candidate’s skill.

Reason 6: Wasting time interviewing unqualified candidates

The Dunning-Kruger effect means the least qualified candidates are likely to have the highest opinion of themselves. Replace a candidate’s perception of themselves with a fair skills assessment, validating their skills.

Reason 7: Missing the needle in the haystack

Do you want to hire the best CV writer or the best candidate? With 100s of CVs to review it’s easy to miss the best candidate. Give your best candidates the chance to show off their skills with an assessment.

Reason 8: Candidates left in the dark

Because of a manual and time consuming process, candidates are not given any feedback at the application stage. With a skills assessment, all candidates can receive meaningful feedback, delivered automatically.

Reason 9: Candidates not getting a chance

The elephant in the room is that… not all CVs even get read! Give every candidate the chance to shine with a skills assessment.

Interested in replacing CVs with skills assessments for your analytics roles? Learn how with Alooba.

This article first appeared on alooba.com on 21st October 2020.