An initiative to build an external talent pipeline for an increasing number of senior executive roles at business process management and outsourcing company Capita has resulted in 14 placements and £618k in savings in executive search costs in its first year.

I have recently had the enormous pleasure and rewarding experience of hiring C-suite executives. Many times their skills and experience could never be condensed into two or four pieces of paper. So I pondered whether the CV is actually dead.

Social entrepreneur Stephen Carrick-Davies is a man who wears many hats. These include working within the non-profit sector as a freelance consultant and trainer, helping to run a successful community café – Hill Station – in South-East London, as well as being interim chief executive of the Inclusion Trust, a trust that focuses on young people who have been excluded – ‘pushed out’ – of mainstream education.

Asking recruiters to celebrate the fact that computer technology is on the verge of being able to make hiring decisions is much like inviting turkeys to vote for Christmas. For a profession that prides itself on its people skills, the idea that such a fundamentally human judgement – matching a person to a role – could be made by a piece of software is borderline heresy.