Our latest webinar saw panellists Janine Garn, Head of Talent Acquisition, Diversity & Inclusion at Leyton, Mari Milsom, Independent Resourcing, Social Value and Workforce Consultant, and Robert Newry, our CEO and Co-founder answer questions around why now more than ever, we should scrap the CV and select for potential. 

Here's a summary of audience Q&As around the use of technology-based assessment to scrap the CV.

Question one: If we scrap the CV, how will we select which applicants to interview?

Janine from Leyton answered: “So, we put everybody who applies straight through Arctic Shores’ platform and then we select who comes to interview based on how well they perform against our success profile. We, therefore, don't need a CV because we have a really strong cognitive and behavioural profile which maps very strongly against the top performers in that business area. That is the only selection tool that we use for deciding who comes through to interview. It has proved incredibly robust so far.”

Mari added: “With the CV you get some fantastic candidates and the businesses really get bought into them. But actually, there are some real behavioural and cultural issues that come out later when you assess them later. Flip that around and put the culture of your organisation and behaviours is the most important thing at the very start. Then you're bringing candidates through and then starting to really dig into those skills, motivations, and experience later in the assessment. You're then not putting somebody who has the wrong ethics, the wrong culture, the wrong motivations in front of your executive.”

Question two: What about people who are not as confident with technology? Does it only work for graduates?

Mari advised that she hasn't seen any impact on age. She said: “From an apprenticeship point of view, I think how you pitch things is quite important. I am seeing more people over 30 applying for apprenticeships (particularly for second careers, etc.). I've seen no adverse impact. In fact, we've seen more mature candidates come through and enjoy the process. You don't need to be particularly literate or a gamer to do this. I can do it, and I'm probably one of the least IT-literate people you will find. So yes, no adverse impact at all.”

Robert added: “The largest population of tablet owners in the UK are the over 55. And one of the things that Arctic Shores spent a lot of time thinking about is to make the user interface super easy and touch-enabled. We don't see any issue at all as to whether somebody is using it for the first time. There are also practice versions that they can go and try out before they actually take the assessment itself. But it is very, very easy. You just have to know how to press a button on a keyboard to be able to participate.”

Question three: How does this address diversity gaps if we are basing our profiles on current high performers?

“You need to think about what success is going to look like in the future as well as in the past,” Robert said. “So, in terms of the data gathering we did and the recommendations we made to Janine and Mari, they incorporate not just what success looked like in the past, but also what it was going to mean for the future. That's really important. And I think part of the question is ‘how do we incorporate the things that are going to make us successful in the future into the things that have made us successful in the past. You need a combination of two. The profile that we're helping set up combines those two areas.”

Janine adds: "What we are looking at with the Arctic Shores profiles, is behaviours. Behaviours should be gender and background neutral. So you can still identify behaviours as a success factor, what you are taking out, is everything else around that. Making it a more favourable for diverse candidate pool."

Question four: Does the screening process result in lots of candidates to interview? Making it a more labour-intensive selection process?

Janine advised: “Not enormously. There's a score they need to reach to get through. That will naturally screen out a percentage of the applicants anyway. And then anybody who is above that threshold – why wouldn't we want to meet them? Because they're going to have the potential to be fantastic talent.

This is actually one of the objections that I had from the business, and I was able to show them how much time they wasted managing under-performers and swapping that with meeting candidates with potential - who are the future high-performers. It’s about your positioning and how you frame that with the business. But we certainly haven't found it very labour-intensive at all. They see it as a worthwhile investment.”

Want to watch the full webinar? You can view it here.