What matters when the CV is no longer enough?

In recruiting we have long oriented ourselves towards seemingly objective criteria: education, university, final grade, number of years in a function, industry experience and a career path with as few gaps as possible. None of that has suddenly become worthless. Expertise counts. Qualifications count. And in medicine, law and regulated technical fields, formal degrees are simply indispensable.

But those criteria do not answer an increasingly important question: how well can this person deal with something they do not yet know? When technologies, business models and entire fields of activity change within a few years, it is not only existing knowledge that matters. At least as important becomes the ability to absorb new knowledge quickly, to question old certainties and to reorient oneself in a changed situation.

Or, put more simply: not only “What can you do?”, but “How do you learn?”.

The World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2025 quantifies it: employers expect 39 per cent of core skills to change or become outdated by 2030. In 2023 that figure was still 44 per cent — so the shift is slowing down, but it remains at a high level. 63 per cent of the companies surveyed name skills gaps as the biggest barrier to their transformation.

For the period up to 2030, the report expects around 170 million newly created and 92 million disappearing jobs. These are employer expectations, not measurements — they should be read as an indication of direction, not as a forecast to the decimal point.

The direction is unambiguous nonetheless, and it has an uncomfortable consequence for personnel selection: the share of what a person already brings when entering a role is shrinking relative to the share they must acquire while in the role. A selection process that examines only the first part examines the shrinking part.

We should therefore be careful when we sort out a CV as “erratic” or “not straightforward”. Of course there are moves that genuinely reflect a lack of orientation. But a move can just as well mean that someone is curious, takes risks, assumes responsibility or has learned to find their way in entirely new situations.

My own career is a good example of this. After many years in corporate groups and leadership functions, I am self-employed today and move between recruiting, interim mandates, building structures in new markets, and technology. Much of what is part of my daily work today did not appear in any job description a few years ago — including my own.

AI in particular has shown me once again how little would carry if I relied exclusively on the knowledge I acquired at some point in the past. What matters is whether I am willing to try out new tools, examine them critically and integrate them meaningfully into my work. Carol Dweck, who coined the term growth mindset, has herself pointed out that in corporate practice it is often reduced to “openness” or “making an effort”. What is meant is something more concrete: the conviction that abilities can be changed through work — and the willingness to treat setbacks as information rather than as a verdict.

AI structures information in seconds, prepares presentations, analyses data and drafts texts that used to take people hours. That changes activities. Some disappear, others emerge.

To conclude from this that expertise or people are becoming less important would be too short-sighted. What becomes interesting is rather the combination: technological understanding plus judgement. Professional competence plus learning ability. Data plus context. Efficiency plus responsibility.

And wherever people work with people, skills remain decisive that cannot be reduced to a good prompt: building trust, understanding conflict, carrying responsibility for decisions, bringing different perspectives together and judging, in an unclear situation, what is right and appropriate.

I much prefer the term power skills to “soft skills”. Because empathy, communication skills, creativity, resilience or the ability to work with very different people are anything but soft. In many roles, it is precisely these skills that decide whether existing expertise has any effect at all.

The WEF report supports this: among the fastest-growing skills are, alongside AI, data literacy and cybersecurity, explicitly analytical thinking, creative thinking, resilience, flexibility and curiosity.

In my mandates I see this most clearly at the second management level — shift management, foreman level, team lead maintenance, quality. Professionally, several candidates often fit here. Whether an appointment still holds after twelve months almost always comes down to whether the person carries a team along and stays calm under pressure.

If we demand agility, innovation and openness to change in job ads, but then select almost exclusively profiles whose CV corresponds exactly to the past, we do not have a wording problem, we have a contradiction in the process.

Modern recruiting should therefore not only ask: has this person done the job before? But also: is there robust evidence that they can learn it and fill it successfully in a new situation? In a CV I am increasingly interested in the places where something happened. Where did someone take responsibility? Where was something built up? Where did they change industry, country or function? Where did someone have to acquire knowledge on their own? What failed — and what did the person do afterwards?

One qualification matters here that is often missing in this debate: “learning ability” must not become a licence for gut feeling. Anyone assessing potential instead of history needs more structure, not less — behaviour-based interviews along concrete past situations, work samples, references specifically about situations of change, and a documented decision paper. DIN 33430 provides the framework for this. Without that structure, one merely replaces a poor filter with an unconscious one.

That the shift is harder than it sounds is shown by research on skills-based hiring: studies by the Burning Glass Institute and Harvard Business School have demonstrated that many companies removed formal degree requirements from their postings without actual hiring practice changing to the same extent. The text of a job ad is simply changed faster than the behaviour in the selection interview.

As the mother of two sons, the topic concerns me from a second perspective as well. I now consider it rather unhelpful to pin children down early on the question: “What do you want to be one day?”

I find questions like these far more interesting: what interests you so much that you dig deeper voluntarily? Which problem would you like to solve? What would you like to try out? What do you do when something does not work on the first attempt?

In my view, children do not need the earliest possible, perfect career plan. They need contact with the real world: building, programming, organising, selling, talking to people, learning languages, making mistakes and experiencing that after a setback you can try a different path. The fact that they will reorient themselves several times over their working lives is not necessarily a threat. It can also mean freedom.