There was a time when a really good CV told you quite a lot.
It wasn't perfect, of course, and good candidates have always been capable of under-selling themselves while less suitable candidates sometimes produced fantastic applications. But the CV still gave you clues about how somebody communicated, what they considered important, how they described their achievements and, to some extent, how much thought they had put into the opportunity in front of them.
AI is changing that rather quickly.
Candidates can now take a job description, upload their experience and create an articulate, beautifully structured application that mirrors the language an employer is looking for, while covering letters can be rewritten in seconds, interview questions anticipated before the interview has happened and answers polished until they sound remarkably close to what a hiring manager might hope to hear.
That doesn't mean candidates are doing anything wrong, because using the tools available to present yourself effectively has always been part of finding a job, but it does create an interesting new problem for employers.
The CV isn't disappearing, but its job might be changing
The shift towards skills-based recruitment was already happening before generative AI became part of everyday working life, but the two trends are now beginning to collide in an interesting way.
Research published this year found that 66% of UK organisations have adopted skills-based hiring, while 58% of candidates say they are more likely to apply for roles that are defined by skills rather than traditional qualifications or career history. Michael Page
In marketing specifically, 51% of hiring managers say they value demonstrated skills over career history and education, while nine in ten marketing professionals surveyed said they use AI during job applications. Michael Page
That creates a fairly obvious question for anyone recruiting into the membership sector, because if the written application is becoming easier to optimise, perhaps we need to become much better at establishing what somebody can actually do.
For membership organisations, that matters because some of the capabilities that make somebody exceptional can be surprisingly difficult to capture in a CV.
A candidate can write that they have excellent stakeholder management skills, but can they build credibility with a difficult corporate member whose renewal is at risk, navigate competing priorities internally and understand when to listen rather than immediately offer a solution?
Someone can describe themselves as commercially minded, but can they spot an opportunity to create value for members while also generating sustainable income for the organisation?
A policy professional can tell you they are an excellent communicator, but can they take an incredibly complicated regulatory issue and explain why it matters to a CEO, member organisation, journalist or government official without losing the substance along the way?
Those are very different things from knowing how to write about them.
This doesn't mean recruitment needs to become suspicious or adversarial, with hiring managers attempting to catch candidates out or somehow prove that they used AI to help write their application, because that would probably take us in entirely the wrong direction.
Instead, it means we may need to become more curious.
Rather than simply asking somebody whether they are commercially minded, ask them to talk through an occasion when they spotted an opportunity nobody had specifically asked them to find, what they did with it and what happened next.
Instead of asking whether they understand members, explore a time when the data was telling them one thing but conversations with members were telling them something different, and ask how they responded.
If somebody says they transformed engagement, dig into what engagement actually meant, how it was measured, what they personally changed and whether the improvement lasted.
The point isn't to make interviews harder for the sake of it, but to move away from testing who can describe a skill most convincingly and towards understanding who has actually demonstrated it.
That distinction could become increasingly important as AI becomes embedded in recruitment from both directions, with candidates using it to support applications while employers themselves increasingly use automation in screening and assessment; the ICO notes that almost three quarters of employers expect to increase their use of AI and automation in recruitment over the next five years. ICO
There is another consequence of all this which we think is particularly interesting.
For years, much of recruitment has focused on reach: how many people saw the vacancy, how many applications were generated and how large the potential talent pool became.
Those things still matter, but when applications are plentiful and increasingly polished, another form of recruitment intelligence becomes much more valuable: knowing what sits behind the CV.
At Membership Bespoke, our UK database now includes more than 16,500 professionals, built over more than 15 years specialising in the membership sector, and the value of that network isn't simply the number of people within it.
It is the conversations that have happened along the way.
It is knowing somebody's motivations, understanding what they actually delivered in a previous role, remembering who impressed us three years ago even though the timing wasn't right, recognising the candidate whose slightly unconventional CV doesn't immediately reveal how good they are, and knowing that the person who looks perfect on paper might actually be less suitable than somebody whose experience needs a little more explanation.
As AI makes information easier to create, context becomes more valuable.
This changing landscape also means the role of a specialist recruiter should go considerably further than advertising a vacancy, collecting applications and sending across CVs.
At Membership Bespoke, part of our role is to help clients look beyond the application itself and make better-informed hiring decisions, drawing on more than 15 years of specialising in the membership sector and the knowledge we have built through thousands of conversations with both candidates and membership organisations.
That can start before the search even begins, by talking through the brief and challenging assumptions where we think they could unnecessarily restrict the talent pool, advising on salary and candidate expectations, helping clients identify which skills genuinely matter for the role and distinguishing between the things somebody absolutely needs on day one and the things an exceptional candidate could learn once they arrive.
As applications become increasingly polished, that guidance becomes valuable in a different way too, because we can help clients look for the evidence behind the words, exploring what a candidate has actually delivered, how they achieved it, the environment they were working within and how relevant that experience is likely to be to a particular membership organisation.
Our 16,500+ UK specialist database gives us considerable reach, but our job isn't simply to search it for matching keywords. It is to use what we know about the market and the people within it to identify candidates who may not immediately look like the obvious choice on paper, while also being prepared to explain why somebody with an impressive CV might not be quite as strong a fit as they first appear.
We can also guide clients through the interview and selection process itself, helping them think about the questions that will uncover genuine capability rather than rehearsed answers, what evidence to probe further, where there may be transferable skills worth exploring and, importantly, what they need to do to secure and retain exceptional people in a competitive market.
That relationship works both ways, because we are having similarly detailed conversations with candidates about what they want next, what motivates them, where they want to develop and what would genuinely make them leave a role they may already be perfectly happy in.
For us, that is increasingly what being a specialist recruitment partner means: not simply finding somebody who matches a job description, but bringing market knowledge, context and human judgement into the process so that both the organisation and the candidate can make a better decision.
And perhaps that becomes even more important in an AI-enabled recruitment market, because if technology makes it easier to find people and easier for people to present themselves brilliantly, the real value increasingly lies in knowing who is genuinely good, who is right for your organisation and why.
There is also a danger worth considering, because if recruitment becomes too dependent on beautifully optimised applications and automated screening, we could inadvertently become better at selecting the people who understand how to navigate the recruitment process rather than the people who will actually perform best once they arrive.
Some exceptional membership professionals aren't natural self-promoters, some have unconventional career histories, some have acquired highly transferable skills under job titles that don't immediately make sense to an algorithm, and others may have spent ten years quietly becoming brilliant at something without ever learning how to turn it into the perfect LinkedIn profile.
That is why human judgement isn't becoming less important as recruitment technology improves.
Arguably, it is becoming more important.
AI can help us search faster, organise information more effectively and remove a huge amount of administration from recruitment, but deciding whether somebody has the judgement, curiosity, credibility, adaptability and relationship-building ability to thrive inside a particular membership organisation remains a much more nuanced question.
The CV still matters, and it probably will for a long time, but perhaps we should increasingly see it for what it is: the beginning of the conversation, rather than the evidence that somebody is right.
Because when everybody can look exceptional on paper, the real skill in recruitment becomes working out who is exceptional when the paper is taken away.