As of 13 August 2026, AI can extract skills from CVs.

What to actually do

1. Hand it to a person

   The route this page recommends

   A person who owns the outcome does this end to end, worth it when the failure is dear.

2. Use a tool built for this

   Second choice

3. Do it yourself

   The distant third

   A chat interface, chat-fluent skill, and roughly 30 minutes until you can act on the result.

   How to actually do it

   1. Open the job description and write down the role's required and desirable skills, qualifications, tools and methods.
   2. Gather the CVs you are authorised to process and remove information that is not needed for skills extraction.
   3. Paste the role description, your skills taxonomy if you have one, and each CV into the prompt, keeping each candidate clearly labelled.
   4. Ask the chatbot to produce the evidence table and the list of role requirements not clearly evidenced.
   5. Compare every extracted skill and evidence label with the exact wording in the relevant CV, correcting omissions, unsupported inferences and quotations.
   6. Copy the checked results into your recruitment record and use them as screening notes rather than as an automatic hiring decision.
   7. If the extraction will affect shortlisting, have a colleague compare the checked notes with the original CVs before acting on them.

   Prompt

   Extract skills from the CV text below for the role described. Use only evidence stated in the CV and do not infer a skill from a job title alone. Separate the results into: 1) explicit technical skills, 2) explicit soft or transferable skills, 3) qualifications and certifications, 4) software, tools and methods, and 5) areas where the evidence is unclear. For each item, quote or closely identify the supporting CV evidence and label it as explicit, indirectly supported, or not established. Do not score, rank or reject the candidate. Do not infer protected characteristics or personal circumstances. Use this skills taxonomy if supplied, but also list relevant skills outside it. Return a table with columns: skill, category, evidence, evidence label, and location in the CV. Then list important role requirements that the CV does not clearly evidence.
   
   Role description:
   [PASTE ROLE DESCRIPTION]
   
   Skills taxonomy, if any:
   [PASTE TAXONOMY OR WRITE NONE]
   
   CV text:
   [PASTE CV TEXT]

   Open it prefilled in ChatGPT or Claude, or copy it into Gemini, which takes no prefill link.