We took the CVs of some of the UK’s most successful, high performing employees and sent them to the recruitment teams at the very companies they work for.

 

But, you guessed it, there was a twist: we changed one small personal detail on their CV to see how it would impact the likelihood of them being offered an interview. Would a foreign sounding name, a career break, a less conventional educational background or even a different DOB stop them getting a call back?

A little bit of background. To cover all bases, some of the CVs were sent as cold emails to internal recruitment teams, and some were in response to open job ads. You might be wondering where we got the CVs from, and in short, the answer is LinkedIn.

For our cold applications we sourced the CVs of high ranking individuals within big UK companies. Think CFOs, CEOs, MDs and Heads of Department. For our job ad applications, we found the CVs of employees who were already in a similar role to the one being advertised. In each case we changed their name, of course.

The results of the investigation were eye-opening.

Of the cold emails:

  • 29% received a response saying their application was being reviewed.
  • 21% were prompted to apply through the official recruitment portal.
  • 50% did not receive a response at all.
  • 0 were offered an interview.

And of the job ad applications:

  • 100% of applicants received an auto-response to say their application was being reviewed.
  • 38% were told they had been unsuccessful.
  • 56% received no update at all.
  • Only 6% of applicants progressed to the next round.

That means, in total, only 3% of applicants in the CV Swapout investigation made it past the CV review stage in the recruitment process. Despite having exactly the same skills and experience as successful employees already at the company.

Things like age, ethnic background, gender, education and taking a career gap just shouldn’t come into play when your CV is being reviewed for a job. That’s why we created the Blind CV tool – a free, simple to use, digital tool that removes this information from the equation. The kind of information that doesn’t have a bearing on whether someone can do the job or not. You can find out more about the tool and how you can implement it in your workplace here.