Is the CV Still the Best Way to Represent Professional Value?

The CV, LinkedIn and the press kit each answer a different question. The mistake is expecting one of them to do all three jobs.

The CV has survived almost unchanged for decades. Despite websites, social media, portfolios and personal brands, most of us still distil our professional lives into two pages of employment history and hope it's enough. We've reinvented almost every other part of work, yet one of its most important communication tools remains largely untouched.

The usual conclusion is that the CV is dead, or at least overdue for disruption. I'm not convinced. A better question is whether the CV is still the best way to represent professional value — because that's its job. Not to tell our life story, not to capture our personality, not even to showcase everything we've ever done. Its purpose is to help another person make a decision. More specifically, to reduce enough uncertainty that they're willing to say yes — to an interview, a contract, a speaking slot, a collaboration.

That makes the CV, at heart, a communication tool. And like every communication tool, it has a purpose, an audience and a context.

The purpose is to reduce uncertainty. The audience is the person making the decision. The context is the conditions they're deciding under — usually limited time, limited attention and incomplete information.

Run the CV through that lens and its survival stops looking remarkable. A hiring manager sifting a hundred applications doesn't have hours to spend on each candidate. They need something concise they can scan quickly and compare consistently, and the CV is optimised for exactly that. And while everything around it has changed, that context hasn't. Screening at volume is still screening at volume — if anything, applicant tracking systems have entrenched the format further. The CV survives because its context survives.

So the problem isn't the CV.

The problem is that we've gradually asked it to do jobs it was never designed to do. Many of us now have far more than an employment history. We have websites and newsletters, articles and podcasts, conference talks and videos, products we've built, communities we've contributed to, people we've mentored and taught.

Collectively, these things often say far more about how we think, what we pay attention to and what we can do than a list of job titles ever could. But no employer, client or collaborator can reasonably consume all of it. They're not going to read three books, browse your website, watch twenty videos and work through two years of LinkedIn posts before deciding whether to interview you.

The answer isn't more content. It's better curation.

Which is what got me thinking about the Electronic Press Kit. Originally developed for musicians and artists, an EPK doesn't try to include everything. It answers the questions a promoter is most likely to ask and presents the strongest evidence in a form that's quick to grasp. It's editorial — someone has already done the work of deciding what matters.

Run the same lens over the EPK and you can see why it looks so different from a CV. The audience isn't someone comparing hundreds of candidates; it's a booker deciding whether to take a chance on one act, and they're willing to go deeper before they say yes. Same purpose — reduce uncertainty — but a different audience in a different context, and so a fundamentally different artefact. Curation instead of comparison.

Do the same with LinkedIn and something interesting happens. Its real audience is nobody in particular. A profile has to serve recruiters, prospective clients, old colleagues and complete strangers all at once, and its context is search. LinkedIn is optimised for being found.

None of these is inherently better than the others. They're solving different communication problems, each shaped by a different decision context. The mistake is expecting any one of them to do all three jobs.

Maybe that's why so many professionals feel uncomfortable trying to represent themselves today. We keep adding more information, hoping that somewhere within it our value will become obvious. But communication rarely works that way.

Clarity comes from choosing — what to include, what to leave out, what another person needs to know to make a confident decision. The real skill isn't building a bigger professional profile. It's becoming a better editor of your own work.

Which brings me back to where I started. The CV isn't broken, and I don't think it's going anywhere — as long as people screen at volume, it will keep doing the job it was designed for.

What's missing is the artefact that sits between the two-page comparison document and the sprawl of everything we've ever made: a professional EPK. A curated, editorial account of your work — the questions your reader is most likely to ask, answered with your strongest evidence, in a form they can absorb in minutes.

Because representing yourself was never about documenting everything you've done. It's about making it easier for another human being to understand who you are, what you bring, and whether they can confidently say yes.

What would it look like?

As an aside, I had a go at structuring what a Professional Press Kit might look like - that link will take you to a worked example.

I figured it would answer the following questions:

1. Who are you?
2. What problem do you solve?
3. How do you think?
4. What’s the evidence?
5. What does working with you look like?
6. How do I get in touch?

And, as the essay above explains, it would need to be tailored for different Purposes, Audiences and Contexts - it would be remiss of me to suggest there is a single version. That would break my own teaching about communication. After all, communication is about effective, not efficient.