Almost One in Ten Have Never Written a CV

The UK is in the midst of a skills shortage with the number of vacancies reaching a historical peak in 2022. There are currently 1.1 million openings that are yet to be filled and businesses are struggling with the extremely tight labour market.

Among cited problems is the evermore complicated hiring processes, yet Moneyzine.com reveals another contributing factor: the nation is not quite up to date with the changing face of recruitment practices.

Even with the rise of platforms like LinkedIn and online application forms, CVs remain a fundamental part of the recruitment process. Considering the rapid adoption of AI-powered resume screening tools, the career advice services should not only cover basic skills like resume writing but should also be attuned to provide appropriate guidance for the modern recruitment practices.

Jonathan Merry, CEO of Moneyzine.com

Curriculum vita–what?

A recent survey questioned the ethics of British job seekers, and it turned out that 8% of the public have lied in their CVs. While it draws attention to a separate issue that needs addressing, the figures have revealed a more concerning problem – almost 1 in every 10 Brits has never written a CV before.

The survey reveals that baby boomers and Generation X, along with the population that is considered to belong to C2 and DE social grades, have the highest proportion of people who never wrote a resume.

The social grades C2 and DE mainly refer to working classes comprising people working in skilled, semi-skilled, and unskilled manual occupations along with the unemployed population and comprise roughly 43% of the British population. This reveals the need for more tailored outreach programmes for career advice for historically disadvantaged populations.

London has the highest proportion of both people who have never written a CV and who have lied about their past experiences before: 1 in every 9 Londoners has never produced a resume, and almost 1 in every 10 has lied in their CV.

Scotland also harbours the highest proportion of people who have never written a CV, while other parts of the country have an even distribution of 9%. Along with London, the North has a high number of people who lied in their resumes, with 1 in every 10 admitting doing so.

You’re fired… before even walking through the door?

Some figures can be explained by generations’ changing attitudes towards their careers. Over two-thirds of people aged 55 and over have been with their employers for over five years, whereas 14.1% of millennials and 14.1% of Gen Z workers have changed jobs over the course of a year.

This means that the majority of older workers may have obtained their current jobs in the days of yore when referrals and in-person applications were much more prevalent than distributing resumes all over the internet, and therefore less accustomed with the recent developments in recruitment.

Younger generations are faced with a much tougher recruitment environment. The skills crisis is fuelled by the increasing number of touchpoints in the hiring cycles with the majority of job seekers (78%) dropping out, or considering doing so, of the recruitment procedure due to the sheer length and complexity of the process. According to the latest governmental figures, for almost one-third (28.9%) of the population that is out of work, the duration of unemployment lasted longer than 12 months.

According to the study led by Sterling, a background screening and identity services firm, 40% of employers harness technology to automate their hiring processes. But this doesn’t always translate into better results: a separate study conducted by TopResume found that 43% of CVs submitted are automatically rejected due to unrecognisable format, and a quarter are passed over for being ‘unidentifiable’ for lacking contact information.

Fixing the problem

BCC’s Jane Gratton proposed further action to implement tailored careers advice and job seeker support: “With an anaemic economy and low productivity, [the] Government must take immediate steps to ease the considerable labour pressures on businesses – we can’t afford to wait any longer.”

Equipping workers with the right job-seeking skills is more crucial than ever with the recession taking a firm hold across the country, which prompts firms to shrink their workforces to stay afloat amid the rising cost of living. Despite the unemployment rate being historically low at 3.7% for the time being, Office of Budget Responsibility (OBR) estimations signal a rise in 2023 and 2024, peaking at 4.9% by the third quarter of 2024.