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Has the humble CV finally met its match?
Most people will have drawn up a curriculum vitae, or resume, at some point in their careers - that all important "path of life" document listing your job history and academic achievements, occasionally peppered with, come on admit it, a tiny bit of embellishment.
But tired of drowning under paperwork from thousands of candidates, and often unable to tell truths from half-truths, French cosmetics company L'Oreal has had enough.
It has chosen the world's biggest jobs market - China - to utter two words that would be music to the ears of beleaguered recruitment executives everywhere: "Goodbye CV".
This year, the 33.000 applicants for the 70 places on the company's Chinese graduate recruitment scheme have been asked to save themselves the paper, the printer ink and the pain.
Instead, they were asked to answer three simple questions via their smartphones.
'Better fit'
China produces seven million job-hungry graduates every year.
The volume of interest means big companies must filter out applicants based on some pretty crude measures. One of the most commonly used is to look at the university that the applicant attended.
"In previous years we've really relied on CV screening as the first step, which is pretty common for a lot of companies," said Jacob Bonk, recruitment director for L'Oreal China. "When in fact what we're really looking for in students is raw talent."
"You want people that are a better fit to your company culture and the competencies that you look for, and they're not necessarily going to have that just because they went to a particular university."
The idea that top companies recruit from top universities is not unique to China. It remains a reason students are so keen to get into such institutions. And in many professions it still holds true.
But there are plenty of experts who questions how much high academic achievement is a predictor for success in the workplace.
Lazslo Bock, the man in charge of hiring for Google, suggest in this New York Times interview that super-successful students may lack a fundamental attribute; the ability to learn from failure.
And in many societies - including China because of schooling restrictions placed on children of internal migrant workers - the education system is stacked against students who are both bright and poor.
'Good predictor'
L'Oreal has long been aware of a big problem with its CV-based recruitment campaign in China. It is just not delivering enough of the kind of employees they need.
Scientific approaches to recruitment are nothing new. Aptitude tests and verbal reasoning models can be used to try to identify key attributes sought by an employer.
More recently there have been developments in the use of "big data", analysing the information stored about large numbers of employees in an attempt to help companies find recruits that are most likely, for example, to be loyal.
But the Shanghai based start-up company that is now helping L'Oreal in China believes it has something much more exciting to offer.