For decades, the CV played a simple role in hiring. It was a record. A summary of where someone had worked, what they had done, and how their career had progressed. Employers treated it as a reasonable proxy for experience and, by extension, capability.
In 2026, that function no longer holds.
Today, the CV behaves less like a record and more like an interface. It sits between a candidate and an automated screening system, between a human and an algorithm. Its primary job is no longer to describe reality, but to pass filters.
This shift explains why many organisations feel hiring accuracy is declining even as their HR tech stacks become more advanced.
How CVs lost their evidentiary value
AI did not make candidates dishonest. It made optimisation easy.
With minimal effort, applicants can now use AI tools to rewrite experience into stronger language, mirror job descriptions precisely, smooth gaps, and generate confident narratives for roles they have not yet fully mastered. The result is predictable. CVs converge.
They sound competent. They sound aligned. They sound ready.
But alignment is not the same as capability.
When every application is optimised for screening, the CV stops differentiating people. It no longer explains how someone actually works, learns, or makes decisions. HR teams end up with a large, polished top of funnel and very little usable signal.
This affects experienced roles just as much as entry level hiring. In fact, senior candidates often become better at narrative control over time, and AI simply amplifies that skill. The document becomes performative rather than evidentiary.
The wrong question HR keeps asking
Faced with this reality, many organisations focus on one question.
How do we detect AI written CVs?
Detection feels logical, but it misses the point. Even a perfectly human written CV would still be a story shaped for approval. The issue is not whether AI is used. The issue is that hiring systems continue to treat narrative documents as proof.
In a world where convincing narratives can be generated on demand, stories lose predictive value. No amount of detection restores the signal that documents once carried.
What the CV actually represents in 2026
That does not mean CVs are useless. Their role has simply changed.
In practice, the modern CV signals three things. Familiarity with industry language. Understanding of what a role is supposed to look like. And the ability to present oneself clearly.
These qualities matter, but they say little about how someone behaves when work becomes ambiguous, pressured, or repetitive. They do not show how a person prioritises, adapts after mistakes, or takes ownership of outcomes.
Yet these are precisely the capabilities organisations say they need most.
Why interviews did not solve the problem
As trust in CVs declines, many teams rely more heavily on early interviews. That rarely fixes the issue.
Interviews still reward narrative skill. They privilege confidence, verbal fluency, and familiarity with expected answers. They are another format for the same type of signal, spoken instead of written.
As a result, real capability gaps often appear late, during probation or delivery, when replacing a hire is costly and disruptive.
A different response is starting to emerge
Some companies are responding by changing what they treat as signal altogether.
Rather than trying to extract more meaning from documents, they redesign the first stages of hiring to make behaviour visible early. The CV becomes secondary. Action becomes primary.
One example is Dandelion Civilization, which has been experimenting with hiring funnels that deliberately reduce the importance of CV screening. Instead of filtering candidates based on written narratives, their approach introduces short, structured steps that require candidates to engage, decide, and complete tasks.
The insight behind this shift is simple. When people move through a sequence of small actions, differences appear quickly.
Some candidates read instructions carefully. Others skim.
Some complete tasks fully. Others abandon them halfway.
Some engage with ambiguity and adjust. Others default to the minimum possible effort.
These behaviours are not abstract. They map directly to what managers later experience on the job.
In this model, drop off is not treated as a problem to minimise. It becomes part of the evaluation. Disengagement, inconsistency, and rushed effort surface early, rather than months into employment.
How AI use becomes part of the signal
This approach also changes how AI use is interpreted.
The meaningful distinction is not between candidates who use AI and those who do not. In modern work, almost everyone will use it. The distinction is between candidates who outsource their thinking and those who guide the tool with intent.
When candidates are asked to make decisions, explain tradeoffs, or revise their work based on feedback, generic AI assistance quickly becomes obvious. Ownership, judgement, and agency stand out.
Instead of hiding AI use, structured tasks make it informative.
What HR needs to stop doing
To adapt to this shift, HR teams need to stop treating CVs as primary filters, predictors of performance, or substitutes for evidence.
The CV can remain a reference document. It just cannot remain the foundation of decision making.
Trying to restore trust in documents will fail. Designing hiring systems that do not depend on them will not.
The shift that matters
The future of hiring is not about banning AI or detecting it more cleverly. It is about recognising that narrative has become cheap and redesigning selection so that behaviour carries more weight than presentation.
Companies that change this now are not reacting to AI. They are accepting what the CV has already become and building processes that reflect reality.
In 2026, organisations that hire well will be the ones that understand a simple truth.
Capability no longer lives in documents. It only becomes visible when people are asked to act.
Original Article: HRnews
If you need to hire talent in 2025 or need help with your recruitment advertising contact our digital recruitment specialist Gareth Allison on 01732 914056 or email info@mysoutheastjobs.co.uk