At Radius Hire, we say it on purpose: we hate CVs.
Not the document. The job we give it.
In a lot of frontline hiring, one self-written page and a short phone call are the main evidence behind an offer. Nothing on that page is checked when it is read.
And that offer is a big decision. One full-time seat in Dutch transport and storage costs about €75,000 a year in labour (CBS: €44.40 per hour worked in 2025, times about 1,700 hours). Entry-level seats cost less. It is labour cost, not the cost of a bad hire.
That is a lot of weight for one self-written page to carry.
Should employers stop using CVs?
No. Keep the CV, and stop treating it as the only evidence.
You have probably read that the CV is dead, or about to be replaced by something smarter. We do not buy it. A CV does several things well:
- It is cheap and fast.
- It shows what someone has done, where and when.
- For roles that need a specific qualification, it is an efficient first filter on whether the candidate claims to have it at all.
- It is the candidate's own account of their working life. No hiring process should throw that away.
Candidates are doing exactly what the format asks of them. They describe themselves as well as they can. The problem starts when a process takes that description, adds a short unstructured call, and calls the result a decision.
The CV is not dead. It is overloaded.
What we actually hate
We hate what the CV is asked to do in a typical frontline process. It becomes the main evidence behind a hiring decision, and it was never built for that job.
Three problems stand out.
1. A CV is a claim, not a record. In many frontline processes, certificates are verified after the offer, by a different team, in a different system. The decision is made on the claim. The later check either confirms it or creates an expensive problem.
2. It is usually read against criteria nobody wrote down. When the criteria are not written down, two readers can reach different conclusions about the same CV. That is a property of the process, not a failing of recruiters.
3. Volume reduces it to its fastest signals. With fixed recruiter hours and more applications per vacancy, reading time per CV shrinks. What survives is a job title, an employer name, a date range, a gap. Date ranges turn directly into "years of experience".
The number that should worry you
The selection research on this is striking. Validity here is an estimated correlation between what a selection method says about candidates and their rated job performance, corrected for measurement error: 0 means no relationship, 1 a perfect one. On the revised 2022 estimates, structured interviews average 0.42, a moderate link to job performance, and the highest of the 25 methods reviewed. Unstructured interviews average 0.19. Years of job experience average 0.07 (Sackett and colleagues, 2022).
In plain terms: the thing a CV shows most clearly, how long someone has done something, is among the weakest predictors of how well they will do it next.
These are averages from many studies, mostly outside the Netherlands, and they measure overall job performance, not retention. The figure also says nothing against certificates and training. Those matter for working safely, whatever the research says about years.
Years on a CV are the start of a question, not the answer.
Some requirements are not on the CV at all
Some requirements that matter on the floor are not CV fields at all:
- Can they reliably reach the site for a 05:30 start?
- Do they accept the real shift pattern?
- Can they keep the physical pace across a full shift?
In a typical process they come up inconsistently in the phone call, or only after the start date.
That gap has a name. The Signal Gap, a term Radius Hire introduced in The Radius Papers 01 (2026), is the distance between what a hiring decision rests on and what predicts the outcome.
Why "replace the CV" is the wrong fix
If the CV is not dead, why not just replace it with something better anyway?
Because replacing one document with one new signal repeats the same mistake. Whether the new signal is a test score, a video or an AI-generated ranking, the risk is the same: one piece of evidence ends up carrying the whole decision.
The fix is not a new single source of truth. It is more than one kind of evidence, collected the same way for every candidate, with a person deciding.
What should sit next to the CV?
Keep the CV. Stop making it carry everything. Next to it, put:
- The same job-related questions for every candidate, rated against criteria written in advance. On average, this is the method with the strongest support in the research.
- Honest questions about what a CV cannot carry: start time, shifts, physical demands. Ask about the job's demands and the candidate's experience of similar work, never about health or medical conditions.
- Verification before the decision, where the law allows it. Certificates are the realistic place to start.
- A named person who decides, and who can see what the decision was based on.
What to do this week
Take one frontline role. Write down the requirements that really decide whether a hire works out. For each one, ask a single question: at the moment we decide, is this supported by anything more than the candidate's own word? Count the answers.
The count will tell you more about your hiring than any opinion about CVs, including ours. The one-hour audit shows how to run it properly.
We hate CVs the way you might hate a spreadsheet that the whole company runs on. The tool is fine. The weight on it is the problem.