What If We Stopped Matching CVs to Job Adverts?

For decades, recruitment has been built around a remarkably simple idea.

An employer describes a job. A candidate describes their career. We compare the two.

If enough things appear to match, we arrange an interview.

It sounds perfectly reasonable. Except we’ve spent time exploring a problem with both sides of that equation.

A CV is an imperfect representation of a person. A job advert is an imperfect representation of an opportunity.

Which raises an interesting question.

What if we’ve been matching the wrong things all along?

The Matching Machine

Think about how conventional recruitment works.

An employer decides they need someone. They create a job description. That becomes a job advert. Candidates see the advert and decide whether to apply. They tailor their CVs to emphasise the things mentioned in the advert. The employer receives perhaps dozens, sometimes hundreds, of applications. Someone, or increasingly something, then has to reduce that pile. Keywords are searched. Experience is compared. Qualifications are checked. Candidates are ranked. Eventually, a shortlist emerges.

We’ve built an enormous matching machine. But what are we actually matching?

Mostly, we’re comparing the language used in one document with the language used in another.

Similarity Isn’t the Same as Fit

Imagine an employer needs someone to help a growing business through a difficult period of change. They need somebody who can bring clarity to ambiguity, build trust with a nervous team, challenge assumptions and turn strategy into action.

Those are meaningful requirements. But they’re difficult to put into a conventional job specification. So instead we use proxies.

• “Ten years’ management experience.”
• “Previous experience in a high-growth environment.”
• “Excellent stakeholder management skills.”
• “Strong strategic and operational capabilities.”

Candidates then respond using those same proxies.

Before long, almost everyone looks vaguely suitable. But we haven’t necessarily discovered who would be brilliant at solving the problem. We’ve discovered who looks most similar to our description of the person we imagined might solve it. Those aren’t necessarily the same thing.

Start With the Person

What would happen if we removed the CV for a moment? Not because career history doesn’t matter. It does. But because we want to understand something else first.

Imagine meeting a professional and asking:

• What are you really good at?
• What kinds of problems do people repeatedly ask you to solve?
• What have you actually changed or improved?
• What evidence do you have?
• What kind of work interests you?
• What matters to you?
• Where do you want to go next?

Suddenly we’re not looking at a chronology. We’re beginning to understand a person.

This distinction matters increasingly as careers become less linear. As we explore in The Future of Work Is Fluid, professional value is becoming less dependent on title and tenure and more connected to strengths, evidence, adaptability and contribution.

Then Understand the Opportunity

Now do the same thing with the employer. Put the job description aside for a moment.

Ask:

• Why do you need someone?
• What are you trying to achieve?
• What problems need solving?
• What would you like to be different six or twelve months from now?
• What kind of environment will this person be joining?
• What can you offer them?
• Why might a talented person choose this opportunity over another one?

Again, something changes. We’re no longer describing a vacancy. We’re understanding an opportunity. And that gives us something much richer to work with.

Now We Can Look for Alignment

This is where matching becomes interesting.

Instead of:

CV ↔ Job advert

we have:

Person ↔ Opportunity

Now we can ask better questions.

• Could this person’s strengths help solve this problem?
• Does their evidence suggest they could create the outcomes the employer needs?
• Does the opportunity align with where the person wants to go?
• Would they enjoy the environment?
• Could the organisation give them something they value in return?

There won’t always be alignment. That’s the point. Good recruitment shouldn’t produce the largest possible number of matches. It should identify the small number of conversations genuinely worth having.

AI Could Make Recruitment Better, Not Just Faster

Artificial intelligence creates an interesting opportunity here. Most discussion about AI in recruitment focuses on efficiency.

• How can we screen more CVs?
• How can we rank candidates faster?
• How can we automate more of the recruitment process?

But perhaps that’s aiming too low.

AI is remarkably good at understanding complex information, identifying patterns and exploring relationships between different sets of information.

What if we used that capability not simply to filter faster, but to understand better?

Instead of asking AI to find ten CVs containing the right keywords, we could ask it to identify people whose strengths, evidence, interests and direction suggest a meaningful alignment with an opportunity.

Technology doesn’t need to replace human judgement. It can help us decide where that judgement is worth applying.

The white paper makes a similar distinction about the changing value of human contribution: as technology handles more routine execution, judgement, interpretation and decision-making become more important, not less.

Perhaps recruitment should evolve the same way.

And Then Something Else Changes

If we can identify meaningful alignment before someone applies, the whole dynamic of recruitment begins to change.

The employer doesn’t need hundreds of applications. The candidate doesn’t need to send dozens of CVs.

Instead, an employer can meet a small number of people they genuinely have reason to be interested in. And rather than sending another generic message saying:

“We have an exciting opportunity you may be interested in…”

they can explain:

We think you could be a great fit for this opportunity, and here’s why.

That’s a very different starting point for a conversation.

Choice Should Work Both Ways

There’s one final piece.

Finding alignment doesn’t mean deciding who gets the job. It means deciding who should talk. Because recruitment should involve mutual choice.

An employer should be able to say:

“We’d really like to talk to you.”

And the candidate should be equally free to say:

“I’d really like to talk to you too.”

Or not.

Neither side should have to persuade the other before there’s even evidence that a worthwhile conversation exists.

Find the alignment first. Then let people do what people are remarkably good at. Talk. Listen. Ask questions. Build trust. And decide.

This Is Why We’re Building Matchez

Matchez is built around a simple idea:

Hiring should begin with understanding, not filtering.

Candidates are more than their CVs. Opportunities are more than their job descriptions.

So we’re building a different way for the two to find each other.

One based on richer professional showcases, clearer opportunities, thoughtful AI-assisted introductions and mutual choice. Not hundreds of applications. Not endless filtering. Not another keyword-matching engine. Just a better way to identify the people you should probably be talking to. Because perhaps the future of recruitment isn’t about building a better way to match CVs to job adverts. Perhaps it’s about finally moving beyond them.