Are You Looking At The Past Or The Future?

Hiring for the future, not just the past

The ritual is well known: a recruiter opens a file, skims through a few lines, a degree, the last job, glances at the dates and hobbies, and decides in a matter of seconds whether a candidate is worth interviewing. Everything begins — and often ends — with a CV. As if the essence of a person could be summed up in a checklist of boxes ticked.

Yet work evolves faster than the lines on that sheet of paper. Jobs that are emerging today didn’t exist ten years ago. Technical skills wear out, get replaced, and are constantly updated. What remains, what truly makes the difference — and will increasingly do so — are human qualities: adaptability, curiosity, listening, the ability to learn. In other words, soft skills.

 

Why the CV doesn’t tell the whole story

The CV has one undeniable advantage: it provides benchmarks, or rather an anchor point. A degree can reassure about the level of knowledge, a past experience can illustrate a skill. But it says nothing about someone’s ability to face the unknown.

Is a young graduate with little experience necessarily less promising than a seasoned manager with fifteen well-polished years? Not always. A self-taught programmer may sometimes outperform an engineer trained in traditional standards. A mother going through a career change can bring resilience, stress management, and time management skills that no school ever teaches. Yet these atypical profiles are often dismissed before they even get a chance to prove themselves.

The CV is a filter, but it is also a barrier. It reduces the person to their past, when the real purpose of hiring is about the future.

 

The case for caution

Of course, it would be naïve to bury the CV. Recruiters don’t choose in a vacuum: they have to manage volumes, secure their decisions, and avoid costly mistakes. A degree or certification, especially in regulated professions such as healthcare or law, is not optional.

The problem is not the existence of the CV, but its monopoly. When it becomes the only criterion, hiring gets locked into a defensive logic: taking no risks at all. Companies then hire reassuring clones instead of emerging talent. They replicate the past instead of preparing for the future.

 

The paradox of modern companies

Ironically, companies have never demanded more agility, critical thinking, or innovation. They want candidates who are adaptable, creative, able to work in teams in an uncertain world. But when it comes to selection, they retreat behind diplomas and dates.

Diversity is celebrated… but only when it ticks the right boxes. Soft skills are declared “essential”… but no one really knows how to measure them. This paradox fuels a deep incoherence: the future we claim to build is still filtered by the tools of the past.

 

What if we looked differently?

There are other ways to read a profile. Group interviews, role-playing exercises, personality tests, peer evaluations… all these tools already exist and allow us to see more than just a CV line.

You can ask a candidate’s peers what stands out about them: their ability to unite, their empathy, their attention to detail. You can observe how they learn something new, how they react to the unexpected. It’s not magic, it’s simply another way of making a decision.

It does take time, and a different, perhaps more courageous recruitment culture. But that’s the price to pay if we want to hire human beings in motion, not frozen archives.

 

Towards fairer hiring

Hiring for potential doesn’t mean ignoring the past. It means broadening the perspective. It means integrating adaptability as a real criterion. It means seeing an unconventional path not as a flaw, but as an asset.

In a world where technical skills age as fast as software, the best guarantee of performance is the ability to transform. And that, no CV can capture on its own.

The day companies start looking at candidates for what they could become rather than just what they’ve already done, they’ll finally be hiring with the future in mind.