CV-less hiring: selecting on skills, and where it works in insurance
By Marie Smart, Senior Talent Business Partner at Vermelo. Marie first wrote about CV-less hiring after a RecFest session in 2023; this is the updated version.
A CV tells you where someone has been. It tells you very little about what they can do, and quite a lot about things you should not be selecting on: how well they write, how confident they are, which school they went to, whether they had help. CV-less hiring, or skills-based hiring, takes the document out of the selection decision and replaces it with evidence of the work. It has been talked about at recruitment conferences for years. This post is about how it operates in practice, and where it fits in a regulated sector.
What "CV-less" actually means
It does not mean knowing nothing about the candidate. It means deciding who goes forward on the basis of what they can do, assessed directly, rather than on a summary of their history. The employment history is still collected, but later, for the checks, once the decision about ability has been made without it.
What replaces the CV
Two things, both structured. First, three or four application questions that ask for evidence rather than description: tell us about a time you did the thing this job does most, what you did and what happened. Second, a short task that is a realistic piece of the job, done in fifteen to thirty minutes with clear instructions. For a claims handler, a short case to assess; for a pricing analyst, a small dataset and a question; for a customer service role, a written response to a difficult customer.
Both are scored against criteria written before the first application arrives, by someone who has not seen the candidate's name, employer or background, and the scores decide who is interviewed. For high-volume roles the task can be automated and scored consistently at scale; for specialist roles it is usually read by a person. How to assess learning ability once someone is in front of you is in how to hire for potential.
Keep the checks, move them
This is the part that worries regulated employers, and it should not. Insurance and financial services businesses still need a full employment history, references, right-to-work evidence and, for some roles, regulatory references and financial and criminal checks before anyone starts. None of that has to happen before you decide who is good. Select on the assessment, make the offer conditional, then collect the history and run the checks exactly as you do now. What you cannot do is skip the checks, or decide on a qualification the role legally requires without verifying it. For roles with a mandatory qualification, ask for it as a yes-or-no question at application and verify it at the checking stage. Everything else can be assessed on the work. What the checks involve is a matter for your compliance team, and what they cost when they are slow is in the hidden cost of slow pre-employment checks.
Why it is fairer, and when it is not
A CV screen filters on background. A skills screen filters on the job. That is why CV-less hiring tends to widen the pool: career returners, people changing sector, people who did not go to university and people who write badly but work well all get through a screen that would otherwise have stopped them. It also removes the unstructured judgement that lets bias in.
It is only fairer if it is structured, though. An unstructured task, scored by whoever has time, against criteria made up afterwards, is worse than a CV, because it feels objective and is not. Same questions, same task, same written criteria, more than one scorer for anyone near the line. How that fits into the rest of an inclusive process is in building an inclusive workplace begins with your hiring, and the adjustments that make a task fair for neurodivergent candidates are in is your recruitment process losing one in six?.
Where it works
Best where the job can be sampled in half an hour and the pool is bigger than the experience requirement suggests: contact centre and customer service roles, claims at first notification, underwriting support, operations, entry-level analytical roles. Volume roles get the most benefit, because the CV screen is where volume hiring loses the most good people fastest; how that plays out is in contact centre recruitment. For volume intakes the natural format is an assessment centre: a half-day where every candidate does the same work-sample tasks and structured exercises, scored on the same criteria by trained assessors, with the CV playing no part in who gets through. Done well it is faster and fairer than screening the same hundred people one at a time.
Where it does not
Senior and specialist roles where the history is the evidence: an underwriter with a book, an actuary with a signing record, a claims director. There, the track record is what you are hiring, and a task cannot substitute for it, though a structured interview and a work sample still improve the decision. Roles with a mandatory qualification, where the qualification is the first screen whatever else you do. And any process where the business is not prepared to write the criteria down, because without them CV-less hiring is just a different way of guessing.
Marie's view: "This works better for some roles than others, and I would rather say so than sell it as a cure-all. Where the job can be sampled in half an hour, I have not found a better screen. Where the track record is the job, I still want to see it."
Where Vermelo comes in
We build skills-based screening into client processes where it fits: the application questions, the task, the scoring criteria and the blind review, with the checks moved to offer stage rather than removed. For volume hiring we design and run the assessment centres, from the exercises and scoring sheets to assessor training and the day itself. That is part of how our embedded talent teams run high-volume hiring, and a process review through talent advisory is the place to start if you want to know which of your roles it would suit.
Talk to us about the roles where the CV is doing more harm than good.