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Most hiring leaders will tell you they hire for skills. Then they open a CV, scan for a university name, check a location field, and quietly filter out everyone who lives more than a commute away. Gerard Holland stopped participating in that process altogether. He came out of finance, spent years placing international students into internships, and then got asked a question by Zondwa Mandela that redirected his entire business: why are you helping privileged people? Today he runs Talent Match Africa, connecting companies in Australia, the UK and North America with full-time professionals working from enterprise grade offices in Addis Ababa, Nairobi, Durban, Johannesburg and Cape Town. In this conversation he explains why he no longer reads CVs, what he had to do to dismantle a bias his clients did not know they were carrying, and why hiring for potential is still the problem nobody has cracked.

Watch the full episode here: https://youtu.be/ZrfORkWBDoA

What you'll learn

• Why hiring within seven kilometres of your office is a resourcing decision disguised as a culture decision
• How Gerard's own picture of Africa was built by charity advertising, and what changed it
• Why professionally produced video profiles outperformed every argument he could make in a sales call
• What happens to a CV when a candidate can paste a job ad into a chatbot and get a perfect one back
• Why big Australian corporates have started mandating in person final interviews
• The case for using AI for shortlisting and humans for everything after it
• Why every second person entering the global workforce by 2035 will live in Africa

GUEST
Gerard Holland, Founder and Executive Director, Talent Match Africa

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gerardholland/
Talent Match Africa: https://www.linkedin.com/company/talentmatchafrica/

YOUR HOST
Anita Chauhan
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anitachauhan/

LISTEN & FOLLOW
Buzzsprout: https://looksgoodonpaper.buzzsprout.com/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@looksgoodonpaperpodcast

POWERED BY WILLO
Willo is the video hiring platform built on a simple idea: you're more than a CV. https://www.willo.video/looks-good-on-paper

CONNECT WITH US
Willo on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/10170893

If this one made you rethink how you screen, share it with someone who still opens with the CV, and subscribe so you don't miss the next episode.

Looks Good on Paper is a podcast about hiring, talent and the limits of the CV, hosted by Anita Chauhan and powered by Willo. In this Season 4 episode, Gerard Holland, founder of Talent Match Africa, explains why he no longer uses CVs to assess candidates, how video profiles changed his clients' expectations of African talent, and how companies can hire across borders without importing the bias that comes with geography and credentials. Topics include remote hiring, offshore talent, skills based hiring, AI generated applications, video screening and hiring for potential.

Show Resources

• Willo: willo.video - The most cost-effective way to screen candidates at scale. Interview candidates anywhere & at any time
• CV Free Toolkit: cvfree.me/join - Break up with the CV and get everything you need to modernize your hiring approach with skills-based assessments
• Anita Chauhan: linkedin.com/in/anitachauhan - Connect with the host

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A CV is the one document where people are trusted to describe themselves, and it is also the one place they are most careful to leave things out. Not the boring things. The real ones. The cricket obsession, the makeup expertise, the 28 years of martial arts, the nails they already know will invite an assumption before they have said a word. We put a single question to people across the industry: what is something about you that would never show up on a CV? The answers were funnier, sharper and more honest than any competency framework, and they all pointed at the same quiet truth. People are holding back the best parts of themselves until they can tell whether an employer is safe enough to show them to.

What you'll learn
→ Why the most revealing thing about a candidate is usually the thing they deliberately keep off the page
→ How bias shapes what people feel able to disclose, from nails to makeup to culture to identity
→ What a "vibe check" is, and why candidates now run one on employers before they open up
→ Why personality, curiosity and how someone actually thinks are almost impossible to evidence on paper
→ The real career cost of never having a place to say what you are genuinely good at

FEATURING:
- Dami Ruth Anibaba (BIC) - https://www.linkedin.com/in/damianibaba/

• Amandi Mendis (Hilton) - https://www.linkedin.com/in/amandi-mendis-7a86aa330/

• Wes Stanford (Center Parks) - https://www.linkedin.com/in/wes-stanford/

• Matthew Best (Willo) - https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthew-best-112a7821/?skipRedirect=true

• Kabeer Ghale (Devonshire) - https://www.linkedin.com/in/kabeerghale/?skipRedirect=true

• Steve Ward (Branding Club) - https://www.linkedin.com/in/steveward-eb/

• Jade Olanrewaju (Songtradr) - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jade-loren-olanrewaju-3a6a95b3/?skipRedirect=true

• Sanah Shah (SCS Railways) - https://www.linkedin.com/in/sanahshah/

• Molly Farnham (SCS Railways) - https://www.linkedin.com/in/molly-farnham-2a0057157/

YOUR HOST: Anita Chauhan
https://www.linkedin.com/in/anitachauhan/

LISTEN & FOLLOW:
https://looksgoodonpaper.buzzsprout.com/ and https://www.youtube.com/@looksgoodonpaperpodcast

POWERED BY WILLO: https://www.willo.video/looks-good-on-paper

CONNECT WITH US: https://www.linkedin.com/company/10170893

If this one made you rethink how you read a CV, share it with someone who hires, and follow the show so you never miss an episode.

This episode of Looks Good on Paper explores what candidates leave off their CVs and why, covering hiring bias, candidate self-disclosure, the limits of CV-first screening, and how employers can build enough trust for people to show up as themselves. It is a practical listen for talent leaders, recruiters and hiring managers rethinking CV-first hiring.

Show Resources

• Willo: willo.video - The most cost-effective way to screen candidates at scale. Interview candidates anywhere & at any time
• CV Free Toolkit: cvfree.me/join - Break up with the CV and get everything you need to modernize your hiring approach with skills-based assessments
• Anita Chauhan: linkedin.com/in/anitachauhan - Connect with the host

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We took a camera around RecFest 2026 and asked one question over and over: what's something about yourself that would never show up on a CV? We got a singer. A horse rider. Someone who runs mountain ultras. A former professional bodybuilder. Someone who grows fruit and vegetables. Someone who is, in their own words, expert at crawling around on the floor with their one-year-old.

And then, from the hiring side of the fence, we got this: I would hire people who are intensely curious, because they're the people who learn best, but I can never see that on a CV without having a conversation. Which is the whole problem in one breath. The trait hiring leaders want most is the trait candidates are trained to leave off. Both sides of the market are reaching for the same thing and the paper is in the way. This is the RecFest Edition supercut, recorded live inside Willo World, and it opens the new season.

What you'll learn

• Why the trait hiring leaders want most is the one candidates hide
• What people actually say when you ask them a better question
• Why personality, working style and motivation don't survive the page
• How a shy candidate becomes the most interesting person in the room, four questions in
• What changes when the conversation comes before the filter

GUEST
Recorded live at RecFest 2026 with Will Mason-Jebb (Connectr), Junead Zaman (Caraffi), Kanwar Kholi (Booking.com), Christina Messaritaki (Yodeck), Dan Hackett (Amazon), Hannah Crawford (Tribepad), Ines Castro (Tribepad), Paula Ryan (Primark), and Daen Fox on the field

YOUR HOST
Anita Chauhan - https://www.linkedin.com/in/anitachauhan/

LISTEN & FOLLOW
https://looksgoodonpaper.buzzsprout.com/

POWERED BY WILLO
https://www.willo.video/looks-good-on-paper

CONNECT WITH US
https://www.linkedin.com/company/10170893 https://www.youtube.com/@looksgoodonpaperpodcast

If this one made you think about your own hiring process, share it with the person who runs it.

Looks Good on Paper is a hiring and careers podcast hosted by Anita Chauhan and powered by Willo. In this RecFest 2026 special, recorded live inside the Willo World activation, talent leaders and recruiters from Amazon, Booking.com, Primark, Tribepad, Connectr, Caraffi and Yodeck answer one question: what would never show up on your CV? The answers reveal why intense curiosity, personality, working style and motivation are the traits hiring leaders say they want most and the traits the CV is least able to carry.

Show Resources

• Willo: willo.video - The most cost-effective way to screen candidates at scale. Interview candidates anywhere & at any time
• CV Free Toolkit: cvfree.me/join - Break up with the CV and get everything you need to modernize your hiring approach with skills-based assessments
• Anita Chauhan: linkedin.com/in/anitachauhan - Connect with the host

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There is almost no business process on earth that works the same way in every country. Payroll differs. Contracts differ. Even the working week differs. But post a job anywhere in the world, and the price of entry is identical: hand over a CV. In this episode, Willo co-founder and CEO Euan Cameron, in the guest chair for the first time in three seasons, makes the case that hiring's only truly global convention is also its most broken one. He tells the real founding story behind Willo: what it's like to be dyslexic in a hiring process built entirely around text, and the moment he realized millions of candidates were being filtered out by a format, not by their ability. From there, the conversation gets practical and pointed: the single biggest hiring mistake companies keep making, the bias that survives even inside proudly progressive teams, what six years of running a company that has never once asked for a CV actually looks like, and what changes first, and slowest, when an enterprise hiring team finally starts reading signal instead of paper.

What you'll learn: → The founding story: how being dyslexic in a text-based hiring world became the reason Willo exists → Why past experience is the weakest predictor hiring teams still treat as the strongest → The "safe bet" bias that quietly survives inside even the most progressive companies → What actually breaks, and what quietly just works, when you remove the CV from your process completely → How Willo Insights turns overwhelming candidate volume into evidence, so the right person never slips through for being quiet

GUEST
Euan Cameron, Co-founder & CEO, Willo
https://uk.linkedin.com/in/euanacameron

YOUR HOST
Anita Chauhan
https://www.linkedin.com/in/anitachauhan/

LISTEN & FOLLOW
Buzzsprout: https://looksgoodonpaper.buzzsprout.com/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@looksgoodonpaperpodcast

POWERED BY WILLO
https://www.willo.video/looks-good-on-paper

CONNECT WITH US
Willo LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/10170893

If this episode changed how you think about a single step in your hiring process, send it to the person who owns that step, and follow the show so the rest of Season 3 finds you.

Looks Good on Paper is a hiring and careers podcast hosted by Anita Chauhan and powered by Willo. In this episode, Willo co-founder and CEO Euan Cameron explains why the CV functions as a flawed global currency for jobs, why relying on past experience is the biggest mistake in modern hiring, which hidden biases persist inside progressive companies, and how Willo Insights helps enterprise hiring teams evaluate every candidate at scale using evidence instead of resumes.

Show Resources

• Willo: willo.video - The most cost-effective way to screen candidates at scale. Interview candidates anywhere & at any time
• CV Free Toolkit: cvfree.me/join - Break up with the CV and get everything you need to modernize your hiring approach with skills-based assessments
• Anita Chauhan: linkedin.com/in/anitachauhan - Connect with the host

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Every athlete who makes a team has to prove they can play. They run drills. They scrimmage. They perform under pressure while someone watches. But in hiring, we skip all of that. We scan a resume for six seconds, run a few conversations, and make a six-figure investment based on how someone talks about work they've done, not whether they can actually do the work in front of them.

The companies still making this mistake aren't doing it because they don't know better. They're doing it because their entire process was designed around a different era of work, and most of them haven't audited it since AI started changing what "job-ready" actually means.

Alan Boyer has been on both sides of this problem for decades. He's a former CMO and senior marketing executive at AT&T, Coca-Cola, and Equifax, a management professor and curriculum architect, and the founder of iThrive Learning Architects. His work sits at the intersection of corporate leadership development and higher education, focused on building the human capabilities that AI cannot replicate. In this episode of Looks Good on Paper, he breaks down why hiring is still built around conversation instead of demonstration, what human skills are emerging above traditional soft skills, and why the gap between graduate readiness and employer expectations is getting wider, not smaller.

What you'll learn: why hiring based on conversational performance instead of job performance produces high washout rates, the executive referral bias that nobody talks about and why it puts hiring managers in an impossible position, why "teaching with AI is not the same as working with AI" and what that means for screening, what human capabilities are emerging above soft skills including cognitive power, systems intelligence, and global fluency, and how the gap between what job descriptions promise and what day one actually looks like is setting candidates up to fail.

GUEST
Alan Boyer — Founder, iThrive Learning Architects
LinkedIn -> [GUEST LINKEDIN URL]

YOUR HOST
Anita Chauhan — Host, Looks Good on Paper
LinkedIn -> https://www.linkedin.com/in/anitachauhan/

In this episode:
0:00 Introduction
0:55 Alan's background across Fortune 500s and higher education
1:59 The biggest hiring mistake: relying on a broken process
2:26 The tryout analogy: why athletes perform but candidates just talk
3:11 AI is accelerating work and companies aren't keeping up
4:52 Where performance-based screening actually happens today
5:56 Human capabilities above soft skills: what AI can't automate
7:30 Hidden biases: cultural, regional, school, brand, and executive referral
8:15 What happens when a C-suite referral skips the process
10:07 What hiring looks like without CVs: chaos or clarity?
11:20 The resume isn't the villain. The process around it is.
12:36 How early careers candidates actually get seen
13:36 Graduate readiness: why companies say new hires aren't ready
14:53 Hiring doesn't stop after the contract is signed
16:12 Quick tips for screening early careers hires

LISTEN & FOLLOW
Spotify -> https://open.spotify.com/show/0dbfz6y0tMq3crViHQD66H
Apple Podcasts -> https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/id1625835562
All episodes -> https://looksgoodonpaper.buzzsprout.com

POWERED BY WILLO
Hire humans, not resumes -> https://www.willo.video/looks-good-on-paper

CONNECT WITH US
LinkedIn -> https://www.linkedin.com/company/10170893

If this episode changed how you think about hiring, share it with one person who needs to hear it.

Most hiring processes evaluate candidates based on how well they present in conversation, not on whether they can perform the actual work the role requires. Performance-based hiring, where candidates demonstrate capability through structured tasks and real scenarios, consistently produces stronger hires and lower turnover than resume screening and behavioural interviews alone. As AI accelerates the pace of work, the human capabilities that matter most, including cognitive power, systems intelligence, and the ability to adapt to ambiguity, are not the same as the soft skills companies have traditionally screened for, and most hiring processes have not been updated to reflect the difference.

Show Resources

• Willo: willo.video - The most cost-effective way to screen candidates at scale. Interview candidates anywhere & at any time
• CV Free Toolkit: cvfree.me/join - Break up with the CV and get everything you need to modernize your hiring approach with skills-based assessments
• Anita Chauhan: linkedin.com/in/anitachauhan - Connect with the host

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The average time to hire in 2026 is 44 days. Taylor Genre's team at Beemac Logistics gives every sales candidate a final answer within 24 hours.

Taylor is the Director of Recruiting and Marketing at Beemac Logistics, a multimodal transport and logistics provider based in Pittsburgh. She came into logistics recruiting from roles at ePeople, Healthcare, and ADP. In this episode, she breaks down why not paying people what they're worth is the most expensive hiring mistake companies keep making and how the cost compounds through turnover, onboarding, and lost trust. She names the bias hiding inside the word "overqualified" and how quickly it becomes ageism when you don't have the conversation. And she walks through exactly what had to change inside Beemac for the 24-Hour Promise to work: it wasn't the recruiting team that needed to shift, it was the hiring managers.

GUEST
Taylor Genre, Director of Recruiting and Marketing, Beemac Logistics https://www.linkedin.com/in/taylor-genre-95935b14a/

YOUR HOST
Anita Chauhan, Host, Looks Good on Paper https://www.linkedin.com/in/anitachauhan/

LISTEN & FOLLOW
Apple Podcasts → https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/looks-good-on-paper/id1625835562
All episodes → https://looksgoodonpaper.buzzsprout.com

WATCH ON YOUTUBE
→ https://youtu.be/WR2j0lc4dG8

POWERED BY WILLO
Hire humans, not resumes.

https://www.willo.video/looks-good-on-paper

CONNECT WITH US
LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/company/10170893

If this episode made you think, share it with one person who hires people. And subscribe — we're rewriting the rules of hiring, one episode at a time.

If this episode made you think, share it with one person who hires people.

The average time to hire in 2026 has reached approximately 44 days, with 81% of hiring managers reporting decision-making paralysis when extending offers. Meanwhile, 61% of candidates accept the first offer they receive, meaning slow companies lose top candidates not to better offers but to faster ones. Organizations that have built alignment between recruiters and hiring managers on decision speed, salary transparency, and candidate communication are consistently outperforming on both offer acceptance and retention.

Show Resources

• Willo: willo.video - The most cost-effective way to screen candidates at scale. Interview candidates anywhere & at any time
• CV Free Toolkit: cvfree.me/join - Break up with the CV and get everything you need to modernize your hiring approach with skills-based assessments
• Anita Chauhan: linkedin.com/in/anitachauhan - Connect with the host

View Details

Startups love being scrappy. They love the hustle. And they keep making the same mistake with that energy: hiring three or four junior people when they should have hired one senior person. Not because junior talent isn't valuable but because without someone who has the reps, the strategy side falls apart and the execution side has nobody steering it.

Jen Paxton is VP of People and Talent at Roofr, where she took the company from around 125 to 260 people. Roofr is her ninth startup. Before that, she co-founded Jamyr (acquired by Recruitics) and built people functions at Smile.io, Privy, LevelUp (acquired by GrubHub), TrueMotion, and more across the Boston tech ecosystem. She holds a master's in vocal performance from Boston Conservatory at Berklee. In this episode, she breaks down the seniority mistake startups keep making, the pedigree bias that drives comp decisions, a big-company horror story involving managers doing their own payroll onboarding, why her team still reviews every resume by hand, and the five-word question Boston TA leaders are using to catch ghost candidates.

GUEST
Jen Paxton, VP of People and Talent, Roofr
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jenpaxton/

YOUR HOST
Anita Chauhan, Host, Looks Good on Paper https://www.linkedin.com/in/anitachauhan/

LISTEN & FOLLOW
Apple Podcasts → https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/looks-good-on-paper/id1625835562
All episodes → https://looksgoodonpaper.buzzsprout.com

WATCH ON YOUTUBE
→ https://youtu.be/KEKYr6m32Yg

POWERED BY WILLO
Hire humans, not resumes.

https://www.willo.video/looks-good-on-paper

CONNECT WITH US
LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/company/10170893

If this episode made you think, share it with one person who hires people.

Startups frequently under-hire on seniority, bringing in multiple junior employees to fill a role that requires senior-level judgment and strategic capacity. The cost extends beyond salary: without experienced leadership, teams lack the ability to balance execution and strategy, context switching overwhelms less experienced hires, and retention suffers when people are placed in roles they are not yet equipped to succeed in. Companies continue to overpay for candidates from well-known brands while undervaluing proven capability from lesser-known organizations. As AI-generated applications flood hiring pipelines, talent acquisition teams face a verification crisis, with structured verification methods, referral networks, and manual review processes emerging as critical defenses against a system producing more noise than signal.

Show Resources

• Willo: willo.video - The most cost-effective way to screen candidates at scale. Interview candidates anywhere & at any time
• CV Free Toolkit: cvfree.me/join - Break up with the CV and get everything you need to modernize your hiring approach with skills-based assessments
• Anita Chauhan: linkedin.com/in/anitachauhan - Connect with the host

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"Culture fit" sounds like a good thing until you look at what it actually filters for. People who look like you. People who sound like you. People who make you comfortable. It's not a hiring strategy. It's a survival instinct dressed up as one.

Daen Fox has led talent acquisition across BT, Bupa, Nuffield Health, RICS, Saint-Gobain, and The Midcounties Co-operative. He's worked in insurance, retail, construction, healthcare, and leisure. He holds a master's in psychotherapy and now runs The Fox Consulting Collective, offering fractional TA leadership, employer brand advisory, and talent strategy consulting. In this episode, he breaks down why "culture fit" is the most persistent bias in hiring, what happened when he removed CVs from assessment centers and let managers evaluate candidates first, how he built a TA team by hiring from marketing and finance instead of recruiting from recruiting, why employer brand is a five-to-ten year investment that most companies still refuse to make, and why AI fluency is the signal he'd be screening for right now.

GUEST
Daen Fox, Freelance Talent Acquisition Leader, The Fox Consulting Collective https://www.linkedin.com/in/daenjafox/

YOUR HOST
Anita Chauhan, Host, Looks Good on Paper https://www.linkedin.com/in/anitachauhan/

LISTEN & FOLLOW
Apple Podcasts → https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/looks-good-on-paper/id1625835562
All episodes → https://looksgoodonpaper.buzzsprout.com

WATCH ON YOUTUBE
→ https://youtu.be/WR2j0lc4dG8

POWERED BY WILLO
Hire humans, not resumes.

https://www.willo.video/looks-good-on-paper

CONNECT WITH US
LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/company/10170893

If this episode made you think, share it with one person who hires people. And subscribe — we're rewriting the rules of hiring, one episode at a time.

If this episode made you think, share it with one person who hires people.

"Culture fit" remains one of the most common and least examined phrases in hiring. Research shows that unstructured evaluations of cultural fit consistently encode unconscious bias, filtering for familiarity rather than capability. Organizations using structured, evidence-based hiring processes hire employees who perform better, stay longer, and are more demographically diverse. Assessment methods that remove resume review from the initial evaluation stage consistently surface candidates that hiring managers would not have selected from a CV alone. As AI reduces the signal value of the written resume, companies that invest in employer brand, structured assessment, and skills-based evaluation are building the infrastructure that will determine their ability to attract and retain talent over the next decade.

Show Resources

• Willo: willo.video - The most cost-effective way to screen candidates at scale. Interview candidates anywhere & at any time
• CV Free Toolkit: cvfree.me/join - Break up with the CV and get everything you need to modernize your hiring approach with skills-based assessments
• Anita Chauhan: linkedin.com/in/anitachauhan - Connect with the host

View Details

Hiring managers keep passing on their best candidates because they haven't figured out what great looks like before the first interview starts. The strongest batch comes in early, gets overlooked, and by the time the team circles back, those people are gone. Months of searching for a needle in a haystack that was sitting on the desk the whole time.

The companies that hire well right now are the ones doing the calibration work before the search opens, and refusing to use company logos as a proxy for capability.

Simran Sidhu leads talent acquisition for Shopify's commercial teams. Before Shopify, she built hiring and people functions from the ground up at startups and scale-ups across Toronto, including Relay, Pocket HR, and Out of Office HR. In this episode, she breaks down the most costly hiring mistake she sees repeated everywhere, the hidden bias baked into how companies source candidates, and the interview format Shopify uses with every single hire, from intern to executive: the Life Story.

What you'll learn:
→ Why slow decision-making is the most expensive hiring mistake, and the calibration fix
→ How big-tech and consultancy backgrounds became a bias disguised as quality
→ What Shopify's Life Story interview actually evaluates (taste, judgment, agency)
→ Why AI is making every resume and every set of interview notes look the same
→ The one-line human override Simran requires on every candidate debrief

GUEST
Simran Sidhu, Talent Acquisition, Commercial, Shopify

LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/in/simranasidhu/

HOST

Anita Chauhan, Head of Brand and Thought Leadership at Willo, Founder at InGoodCo. https://www.linkedin.com/in/anitachauhan/

In this episode:

TIMESTAMPS
00:00 Intro
02:39 The biggest hiring mistake companies make
08:16 Hidden hiring bias in big tech recruiting
13:16 Shopify’s Life Story Interview
18:58 AI-generated resumes and interviews
21:59 How Shopify approaches AI usage in hiring
23:27 The problem with AI-written interview notes

LISTEN & FOLLOW
Apple Podcasts → https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/looks-good-on-paper/id1625835562
All episodes → https://looksgoodonpaper.buzzsprout.com

WATCH ON YOUTUBE
→ https://youtu.be/gm_30sNXZ8o

POWERED BY WILLO
Hire humans, not resumes.

https://www.willo.video/looks-good-on-paper

CONNECT WITH US
LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/company/10170893

If this episode made you think, share it with one person who hires people. And subscribe — we're rewriting the rules of hiring, one episode at a time.

The most common reason companies lose their strongest candidates is not compensation or competition. It is indecision. Hiring managers who have not calibrated their evaluation criteria before interviewing pass on strong early candidates, extend the search, and recognize the original batch was the strongest only after those candidates have moved on. This pattern compounds with employer brand damage: roles that stay posted for months signal dysfunction to the market. Companies like Shopify have restructured their interview process around a Life Story conversation that evaluates judgment, self-awareness, and agency rather than credentials, titles, or company logos. As AI-generated resumes and AI-summarized interview notes become ubiquitous, the ability to assess a candidate's reasoning and decision-making history, not their polished output, is emerging as the primary differentiator in talent acquisition.

Show Resources

• Willo: willo.video - The most cost-effective way to screen candidates at scale. Interview candidates anywhere & at any time
• CV Free Toolkit: cvfree.me/join - Break up with the CV and get everything you need to modernize your hiring approach with skills-based assessments
• Anita Chauhan: linkedin.com/in/anitachauhan - Connect with the host

View Details

Half of all hires do not work out. Jenny Do Forno, CPO at TouchBistro, explains why the hiring process is measuring the wrong things and what to do instead.

Jenny has spent nearly 25 years building and scaling teams from zero to 1,500 people across startups, scale-ups, and venture-backed companies. She has assessed and supported over 90 companies on how they hire, grow, and operate through her work at OMERS Ventures and the Schulich Venture Academy.

In this conversation, Jenny names the three problems she still sees at every level: interviews that reward polish over substance, a persistent bias against career breaks, and a pedigree obsession that confuses where someone worked with what they can actually do.

You will learn how to redesign references for real insight, why career break bias is one of the most common hidden filters in hiring, what happens when companies hire for logos instead of capability, and why Jenny wants to pull the entire process out and rebuild it from scratch.

GUEST:

Jenny Do Forno, Chief People Officer at TouchBistro https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennydoforno/

HOST

Anita Chauhan, Head of Brand and Thought Leadership at Willo, Founder at InGoodCo. https://www.linkedin.com/in/anitachauhan/

LISTEN & FOLLOW

Youtube: https://youtu.be/qmTSMJHjxhA
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0dbfz6y0tMq3crViHQD66H
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/looks-good-on-paper/id1625835562

POWERED BY WILLO https://www.willo.video/looks-good-on-paper

CONNECT WITH US https://www.willo.video

https://www.linkedin.com/company/10170893/

Share this episode with a recruiter or hiring manager who needs to hear it. Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts.

Looks Good on Paper is a hiring podcast that explores the gap between how confident companies think they are in their hiring process and how confident they should actually be. Host Anita Chauhan talks to talent leaders, recruiters, and workforce strategists about the assumptions, biases, and blind spots that shape how companies find, assess, and keep talent. Season 3 is The Confidence Gap: what do you actually trust in your hiring process?

Hiring processes that rely on 45-minute interviews are measuring presentation skills, not job performance. Companies that restructure their process around deep references, work-based assessments, and targeted capability questions consistently close the gap between interview confidence and on-the-job results. Career break bias remains one of the least discussed but most common hidden filters in hiring, penalizing candidates for caregiving, burnout recovery, and personal development without evidence that breaks predict lower performance.

Show Resources

• Willo: willo.video - The most cost-effective way to screen candidates at scale. Interview candidates anywhere & at any time
• CV Free Toolkit: cvfree.me/join - Break up with the CV and get everything you need to modernize your hiring approach with skills-based assessments
• Anita Chauhan: linkedin.com/in/anitachauhan - Connect with the host

View Details

Deepfakes in hiring interviews are real. A recruiter at Xero shares the story of a candidate who impersonated a deceased person on a video call, and explains how his team catches fake profiles, eliminates culture fit bias, and reviews every single applicant without using AI to screen anyone out.

Nit Karuna is a Principal AI/ML Recruiter at Xero with over a decade of experience building technical teams across Canada, the US, UK, Sweden, Australia, and New Zealand. He leads recruitment for engineering, product, and data roles, including VPs of product and engineering, principal ML leaders, and applied scientists.

In this episode, Nit breaks down the three confidence problems he sees in hiring right now: the pedigree trap (assuming someone from Google or Meta will automatically level up your team), culture fit interviews that function as vibe checks instead of structured assessments, and the growing wave of deepfakes and identity fraud that is forcing companies to rethink how they verify candidates.

What you'll learn → Why hiring from big-brand companies backfires more often than recruiters admit → How culture fit rounds become bias traps when there are no structured criteria → What Xero does in intake calls to map team gaps and hold managers accountable → How deepfakes and fake profiles are showing up in live hiring interviews in 2026 → Why Nit personally reviews every applicant and refuses to let AI screen candidates out → What a hiring process without CVs could look like for engineering and AI roles → How to spot red flags on video calls (camera off, mismatched audio, off-screen typing)

GUEST
Nit Karuna, Principal AI/ML Recruiter at Xero https://www.linkedin.com/in/nitharsen/

YOUR HOST
Anita Chauhan, Founder of InGoodCo. https://www.linkedin.com/in/anitachauhan/

LISTEN & FOLLOW

Youtube: https://youtu.be/qmTSMJHjxhA
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0dbfz6y0tMq3crViHQD66H
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/looks-good-on-paper/id1625835562

POWERED BY WILLO https://www.willo.video/looks-good-on-paper

CONNECT WITH US https://www.willo.video

https://www.linkedin.com/company/10170893/

Share this episode with a recruiter or hiring manager who needs to hear it. Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts.

Looks Good on Paper is a hiring podcast that explores the gap between how confident companies think they are in their hiring process and how confident they should actually be. Host Anita Chauhan talks to talent leaders, recruiters, and workforce strategists about the assumptions, biases, and blind spots that shape how companies find, assess, and keep talent. Season 3 is The Confidence Gap: what do you actually trust in your hiring process?

Show Resources

• Willo: willo.video - The most cost-effective way to screen candidates at scale. Interview candidates anywhere & at any time
• CV Free Toolkit: cvfree.me/join - Break up with the CV and get everything you need to modernize your hiring approach with skills-based assessments
• Anita Chauhan: linkedin.com/in/anitachauhan - Connect with the host

View Details

Most hiring decisions get made on a feeling. A hiring manager comes out of an interview, says "I think this one is a better fit," and the team moves forward. Anu Joshi has spent 17 years inside talent functions watching that pattern play out, and she has a problem with it. Interviews are high-pressure performance environments. The candidates who do well are often the ones who can read the room and tell you what you want to hear. The ones who freeze are not necessarily worse at the job. They are worse at the interview.

Those are different things, and most teams are confusing them. Anu is currently Director of Talent at FutureSight, where she leads executive and leadership hiring for early-stage B2B AI companies. In this episode she walks through the biggest hiring mistakes she sees teams keep making, the bias she would eliminate first if she could pick only one, and what hiring actually looks like when you decenter the CV. She also gets specific about a recent founding engineer search where the team replaced the front of the funnel with a work sample and a short video walkthrough, and the candidate they hired told them the process felt like a real conversation about real work instead of a performance.

What you'll learn:

→ Why making hiring decisions on gut feeling out of an interview is the biggest mistake companies keep making
→ How bias against non-linear career trajectories quietly costs companies their best candidates
→ What it actually looks like to decenter the CV in a real founding engineer search
→ Why AI in hiring is not about losing jobs but about roles getting redefined, and what talent leaders need to do about it

GUEST
Anu Joshi, Director of Talent at FutureSight — LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/in/anu-joshi-sphri%E2%84%A2-46988a12/

YOUR HOST
Anita Chauhan — LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/in/anitachauhan/

LISTEN & FOLLOW
Spotify → https://open.spotify.com/show/0dbfz6y0tMq3crViHQD66H
Apple Podcasts → https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/looks-good-on-paper/id1625835562
All episodes → https://looksgoodonpaper.buzzsprout.com/

POWERED BY WILLO
Hire humans, not resumes → https://www.willo.video/looks-good-on-paper
LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/company/10170893/

If this episode changed how you think about hiring, share it with one person who needs to hear it. And subscribe — we're rewriting the rules of hiring, one episode at a time.

The person who performs best in an interview is not always the person who performs best in the job. Most hiring teams are still rewarding interview performance instead of skill, making decisions based on gut feeling rather than structured competency frameworks built from the actual gap they're trying to fill. Bias against non-linear career trajectories, including shorter tenures and career breaks for caregiving or burnout, is one of the most common hidden biases in modern hiring and is quietly costing companies their best candidates. Decentering the CV in favour of work samples and short async video walkthroughs is emerging as a more reliable signal of fit than resume review, particularly in early-stage and venture studio hiring where the gap between credential and capability is widest.

Show Resources

• Willo: willo.video - The most cost-effective way to screen candidates at scale. Interview candidates anywhere & at any time
• CV Free Toolkit: cvfree.me/join - Break up with the CV and get everything you need to modernize your hiring approach with skills-based assessments
• Anita Chauhan: linkedin.com/in/anitachauhan - Connect with the host

View Details

The person who interviews the best is not always the person who performs the best. In fact, sometimes they're the worst hire you'll make. Hamza Khan knows this firsthand. His own company, SkillsCamp, a soft skills training company, fell into the exact trap he teaches others to avoid: they hired someone who interviewed brilliantly and failed in the role. The wake-up call was brutal. If this can happen at a company whose entire business is power skills, it can happen anywhere.

Hamza is a bestselling author, leadership researcher, and keynote speaker whose TEDx talk "Stop Managing, Start Leading" has been viewed millions of times. He's also the co-founder of SkillsCamp and Sage.

In this episode, Hamza introduces the dark triad (narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy) as the hidden bias most companies have no way to screen for, explains why hope has become the number one thing employees need from leaders, and makes the case for distributed hiring decisions and real reference checks.

What you'll learn:

→ Why hiring for technical skills while ignoring soft skills is the biggest mistake companies keep making

→ How the dark triad presents as positive traits in interviews (confidence, strategic thinking, charisma)

→ What a real reference check looks like versus the version most companies skip

→ How AI is creating fabricated personas that pass the interview but fail in the role

GUEST

Hamza Khan — LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/in/khanhamza/

YOUR HOST

Anita Chauhan — LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/in/anitachauhan/

LISTEN & FOLLOW

Spotify → https://open.spotify.com/show/0dbfz6y0tMq3crViHQD66H

Apple Podcasts → https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/looks-good-on-paper/id1625835562

All episodes → https://looksgoodonpaper.buzzsprout.com/

WATCH ON YOUTUBE - https://youtu.be/yGj5uLLcA8g

POWERED BY WILLO

Hire humans, not resumes

→ https://www.willo.video/looks-good-on-paper

CONNECT WITH US

LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/company/10170893/

If this episode changed how you think about hiring, share it with one person who needs to hear it. And subscribe — we're rewriting the rules of hiring, one episode at a time.

The person who interviews the best is not always the best hire. Companies continue to over-index on technical skills while ignoring the relational and leadership skills that actually predict performance, retention, and team health. The dark triad (narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy) presents as positive traits in interview settings: confidence, strategic thinking, and charisma. Without structured assessment for soft skills, communication, and collaboration, even companies that specialize in leadership development can hire the wrong person. Hope has overtaken trust, stability, and compassion as the number one thing employees need from their leaders.

Show Resources

• Willo: willo.video - The most cost-effective way to screen candidates at scale. Interview candidates anywhere & at any time
• CV Free Toolkit: cvfree.me/join - Break up with the CV and get everything you need to modernize your hiring approach with skills-based assessments
• Anita Chauhan: linkedin.com/in/anitachauhan - Connect with the host

View Details

The skills-based economy arrived five years ago. Hiring still hasn't caught up. Most companies understand the concept of hiring for skills over job titles, but they hit a wall when it comes to translating that into an actual hiring process. The result: job postings still screen for titles, years of experience, and credentials that don't predict whether someone can do the work.

Susan Sutherland has spent her career at the intersection of brand and growth, with a particular edge in employer brand. At Intact, one of Canada's largest insurers, she led enterprise employer brand strategy end to end. Now she works with startups. And her perspective is sharp: she's a marketer who fell into employer branding, meaning she sees the hiring process the way a customer would see a broken sales funnel.

In this episode, Susan makes the case for portfolios over resumes, explains why years of experience cuts both ways as a filter, and calls out the internal mobility policies that quietly drive top talent out the door.

What you'll learn:

→ Why the skills-based hiring mindset stalls at the point of actual screening
→ How years of experience bias works against candidates in both directions
→ Why internal mobility policies with time-in-role minimums lose top talent
→ The case for portfolios as the replacement for resume bullet points

GUEST

Susan Sutherland — Employer Brand & Growth Marketing Strategist
LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/in/susan-sutherland/

YOUR HOST

Anita Chauhan — Fractional CMO & Host, Looks Good on Paper
LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/in/anitachauhan/

LISTEN & FOLLOW
Apple Podcasts → https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/looks-good-on-paper/id1625835562
All episodes → https://looksgoodonpaper.buzzsprout.com/

WATCH ON YOUTUBE
https://youtu.be/ZU78NbLXQe0

POWERED BY WILLO
Hire humans, not resumes → https://www.willo.video/looks-good-on-paper

CONNECT WITH US
LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/company/waboratories/

If this episode changed how you think about hiring, share it with one person who needs to hear it. And subscribe — we're rewriting the rules of hiring, one episode at a time.

The skills-based economy arrived five years ago, but most hiring processes haven't caught up. Companies understand the concept of hiring for skills over job titles, but default to screening for credentials, years of experience, and pattern-matched career paths.

Years of experience bias cuts both ways: overqualified candidates get screened out for being "too senior," while candidates with fewer years but faster learning environments get dismissed for lacking tenure. Portfolios that show real work are emerging as a stronger signal than resume bullet points in an era where AI can generate a flawless CV in seconds.

Show Resources

• Willo: willo.video - The most cost-effective way to screen candidates at scale. Interview candidates anywhere & at any time
• CV Free Toolkit: cvfree.me/join - Break up with the CV and get everything you need to modernize your hiring approach with skills-based assessments
• Anita Chauhan: linkedin.com/in/anitachauhan - Connect with the host

View Details

Companies keep saying they've moved past credential-based hiring. They haven't. Most are still filtering for where someone worked, where they went to school, and how many years they've held a similar title. The data says that's not the signal that predicts performance. What does? How someone thinks, learns, and collaborates inside a team.

Sachi Kittur calls it the credential trap. And after 20+ years inside organizations during some of their most turbulent moments, she's seen how deep it goes. Companies that say they value diversity are still optimizing for comfort and familiarity. Leaders who claim to hire for potential are actually hiring for pattern recognition. And the result is a confidence in hiring that's borrowed, not earned.

In this episode, Sachi breaks down why learning velocity is replacing adaptability as the most important skill signal, why removing the CV forces a better conversation, and why the biggest business risk she sees right now isn't technology. It's the loss of human connectivity.

What you'll learn: → Why the credential trap persists at every level, including C-suite → How pattern recognition bias disguises itself as hiring strategy → What "learning velocity" means and why it matters more than experience → How to replace the CV with structured, stage-appropriate conversations → Why human connectivity is the biggest business risk companies are ignoring

HOST

Anita Chauhan — Host, Looks Good on Paper
LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/anitachauhan/

GUEST
Sachi Kittur — Future Work Advisor, VP of Human Experience & Innovation at HRPA
LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/in/sachikittur/

0:00 — Intro
0:16 — Meet Sachi Kittur
1:20 — How Sachi got here: keeping the humanitarian ethos alive in HR
2:26 — Q1: The biggest hiring mistake companies keep making
3:04 — The credential trap
5:48 — Q2: Hidden bias companies unknowingly have
6:04 — Pattern recognition bias: when comfort disguises itself as strategy
7:59 — Microsoft's approach to trust and guardrails in hiring
8:41 — Q3: What happens if you remove the CV
10:19 — Learning velocity: the new superpower skill
11:18 — 90% of conflict resolution traces back to one thing
12:20 — How growth-stage companies should replace the CV
13:51 — Wildcard: How to increase hiring confidence over the next year
15:24 — Pick up the phone: the case for old-school conversations
15:56 — The biggest business risk: losing human connectivity
17:02 — Wrap-up

LISTEN & FOLLOW
Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/0dbfz6y0tMq3crViHQD66H
Apple Podcasts - https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/id1625835562
All episodes - https://looksgoodonpaper.buzzsprout.com

WATCH ON YOUTUBE https://youtu.be/vWrVcMjH0o8

POWERED BY WILLO Hire humans, not resumes - https://www.willo.video/looks-good-on-paper

CONNECT WITH US
LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/10170893

If this episode changed how you think about hiring, share it with one person who needs to hear it. And subscribe — we're rewriting the rules of hiring, one episode at a time.

Companies keep saying they've moved past credential-based hiring. The credential trap — filtering for school, company name, and years of experience over actual learning capability — is still the default in most organizations, even progressive ones. Pattern recognition bias means leaders claim to hire for diversity while consistently selecting candidates who mirror their last successful hire. Learning velocity, not adaptability, is emerging as the skill signal that best predicts performance in high-growth environments.

Show Resources

• Willo: willo.video - The most cost-effective way to screen candidates at scale. Interview candidates anywhere & at any time
• CV Free Toolkit: cvfree.me/join - Break up with the CV and get everything you need to modernize your hiring approach with skills-based assessments
• Anita Chauhan: linkedin.com/in/anitachauhan - Connect with the host

View Details

Most companies believe they've moved past credential bias. They've rewritten their job descriptions, dropped degree requirements, maybe even adopted skills assessments.

But when six hiring leaders were asked the same question independently, without hearing each other's answers, every single one pointed to the same blind spot: companies are still screening for where someone has worked instead of evaluating whether they can actually do the job.

The language has shifted. The behavior hasn't. "We need someone who's operated at scale" still means "did you work at a company I've heard of." And the teams that recognize this pattern in their own process, the ones willing to strip away the shortcuts and sit with what's left, are the ones making better hires right now.

This is a Season 2 supercut from Looks Good on Paper.

Six voices, one question, and an answer that should make every hiring team uncomfortable.

What you'll learn:
- Why screening for recognizable company names is outsourcing your talent assessment to a third party
- How one team removes company names, school names, and years of experience from every candidate presentation
- The difference between hiring for cultural fit and hiring for cultural addition - Why the most progressive hiring leaders actively avoid big-company experience for certain roles
- What happens when you force hiring managers to question their own screening defaults

GUESTS
Mike Bettley — VP Talent, StackAdapt
Gillian Emerson — Sr. Director Talent Acquisition, Toast
Jeff Waldman — Founder, ScaleHR
Sarah Sheikh — Chief of Staff, Loop Financial
Julia Arpag — Founder & CEO, Aligned Recruitment
Jim Berrisford — VP Partnerships, Willo

YOUR HOST

Anita Chauhan — Host, Looks Good on Paper
LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/anitachauhan/

LISTEN & FOLLOW
Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/0dbfz6y0tMq3crViHQD66H
Apple Podcasts - https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/id1625835562
All episodes - https://looksgoodonpaper.buzzsprout.com

WATCH ON YOUTUBE - https://youtu.be/34sf1c3bKUc

POWERED BY WILLO Hire humans, not resumes - https://www.willo.video/looks-good-on-paper

CONNECT WITH US
LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/10170893
If this episode changed how you think about hiring, share it with one person who needs to hear it. And subscribe — we're rewriting the rules of hiring, one episode at a time.

When companies use recognizable employer names as a shortcut for evaluating candidate quality, they are outsourcing their talent assessment to another organization's hiring standards rather than evaluating capability directly.

Skills-based approaches that remove company names, school names, and credential signals from candidate evaluation consistently surface stronger matches by forcing hiring teams to assess problem-solving ability, adaptability, and role-specific competence on their own terms.

The gap between how confident companies are in their hiring process and how confident they should be is one of the most underexamined problems in modern talent acquisition.

Show Resources

• Willo: willo.video - The most cost-effective way to screen candidates at scale. Interview candidates anywhere & at any time
• CV Free Toolkit: cvfree.me/join - Break up with the CV and get everything you need to modernize your hiring approach with skills-based assessments
• Anita Chauhan: linkedin.com/in/anitachauhan - Connect with the host

View Details

AI is flooding hiring pipelines — and most of the tools claiming to fix it are making the noise worse. Automated outreach, AI-generated applications, and screening tools that were never built for the volume they're now processing: the signal-to-noise problem in recruiting has never been worse.

The teams navigating it best aren't the ones with the most sophisticated tech stack. They're the ones who stayed clearest about what a good hire actually looks like — and built their process around finding that, not processing everything.

Julia Arpag, Founder and CEO of Aligned Recruitment, has spent over a decade placing talent at high-growth tech companies and she's watching the same mistake repeat itself: teams outsourcing judgment to automation and wondering why the humans they hire keep disappointing them. In this episode of Looks Good on Paper, she breaks down what's actually shifting in hiring right now, why people-first recruiting is harder than it sounds when the tech is moving this fast, and what separates companies getting great hires from the ones spinning their wheels.

What you'll learn:

→ What AI is actually doing to hiring pipelines in 2026 versus what vendors claim

→ Why people-first recruiting is harder to maintain as automation scales

→ What the companies making the best hires right now have in common

GUEST

Julia Arpag — Founder & CEO, Aligned Recruitment

LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/in/julia-arpag/

YOUR HOSTS

Anita Chauhan — Fractional CMO, co-host

LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/in/anitachauhan/

In this episode:

0:00 Introduction

2:27 The biggest hiring mistake companies keep making

3:08 Why "culture fit" leads to homogeneity

3:34 Skills assessments for every role, not just technical ones

6:23 Hidden biases even progressive companies have

9:04 What hiring looks like without resumes

10:49 "It's just robots hanging out"

11:08 Calling candidates to reject them instead of emailing

11:43 Julia's husband's nonprofit-to-tech pivot story

LISTEN & FOLLOW

Spotify → https://open.spotify.com/show/0dbfz6y0tMq3crViHQD66H

Apple Podcasts → https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/id1625835562

All episodes → https://looksgoodonpaper.buzzsprout.com

WATCH ON YOUTUBE - https://youtu.be/8ukiBXAZKRw

POWERED BY WILLO

Hire humans, not resumes → https://www.willo.video/looks-good-on-paper

CONNECT WITH US

LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/company/10170893

If this episode changed how you think about hiring, share it with one person who needs to hear it. And subscribe — we're rewriting the rules of hiring, one episode at a time.

The signal-to-noise problem in hiring has reached a critical point. AI-generated applications have made volume metrics meaningless, and automated screening tools trained on historical data replicate historical bias at scale. The companies making the best hires in 2026 are the ones who have stayed clear about what good looks like — and built their process around finding that rather than processing everything.

Show Resources

• Willo: willo.video - The most cost-effective way to screen candidates at scale. Interview candidates anywhere & at any time
• CV Free Toolkit: cvfree.me/join - Break up with the CV and get everything you need to modernize your hiring approach with skills-based assessments
• Anita Chauhan: linkedin.com/in/anitachauhan - Connect with the host

View Details

Hiring isn't broken. It's over-engineered. Every new tool added to the stack, every extra screening step, every automated touchpoint is making the process heavier — and candidates can feel it.

The irony is that teams adding complexity are usually trying to make better decisions. But more steps without better signal just produces slower decisions with the same quality. And in a competitive talent market, slow is a filter that works against you.

Jim Berrisford, VP of Partnerships at Willo, has a front-row seat to where hiring processes break down — and where the simplest interventions create the biggest improvements. In this episode of Looks Good on Paper, he unpacks why adding more technology to a broken process just breaks it faster, what poor candidate communication is actually costing you in offer acceptance and employer brand, and where the real leverage is when you want to hire better without adding more noise.

What you'll learn:

→ Why complexity in hiring creates worse outcomes, not better ones

→ What poor candidate communication costs you beyond just the immediate hire

→ The simplest changes that have the biggest impact on hiring quality

GUEST
Jim Berrisford — VP of Partnerships, Willo
LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/in/talentattractiontech-hrtech-tech2rec/

YOUR HOSTS
Anita Chauhan — Fractional CMO, co-host
LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/in/anitachauhan/

🕘 Chapters
00:00 — Intro & Jim’s background in recruitment and HR tech
02:20 — The biggest hiring mistake: poor communication
03:30 — Why “throwing tech at hiring” backfires
05:00 — AI noise vs real assisted intelligence
06:30 — Hidden bias and lived experience in hiring panels
09:20 — What hiring without CVs could actually look like
12:30 — Over-engineering recruitment systems
14:20 — Human-centric technology in hiring
16:30 — Final thoughts on AI, nuance, and the hiring journey

LISTEN & FOLLOW
Spotify → https://open.spotify.com/show/0dbfz6y0tMq3crViHQD66H
Apple Podcasts → https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/id1625835562
All episodes → https://looksgoodonpaper.buzzsprout.com

WATCH ON YOUTUBE - https://youtu.be/u54b2w6OnRc

POWERED BY WILLO

Hire humans, not resumes → https://www.willo.video/looks-good-on-paper

CONNECT WITH US

LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/company/10170893

If this episode changed how you think about hiring, share it with one person who needs to hear it. And subscribe — we're rewriting the rules of hiring, one episode at a time.

Over-engineered hiring processes don't produce better decisions — they produce slower ones with the same quality. Each additional step that doesn't generate new signal adds friction for candidates without adding value for hiring teams. The companies hiring best in 2026 are removing steps, not adding them.

Show Resources

• Willo: willo.video - The most cost-effective way to screen candidates at scale. Interview candidates anywhere & at any time
• CV Free Toolkit: cvfree.me/join - Break up with the CV and get everything you need to modernize your hiring approach with skills-based assessments
• Anita Chauhan: linkedin.com/in/anitachauhan - Connect with the host

View Details

The resume was already a weak signal before AI. Now candidates generate polished CVs in minutes, ATS systems sort on keywords, and hiring teams are drowning in documents that tell them almost nothing about whether someone can actually do the work.

The resume's fundamental problem isn't that people lie on it — it's that even honest resumes measure the wrong things. They capture job titles and tenure, not judgment, adaptability, or the ability to produce outcomes in a specific context.

Jeff Waldman from ScaleHR has spent years helping companies fix what their hiring process is actually measuring. In this episode of Looks Good on Paper, he explains why most traditional hiring signals fail, what to look for instead, and why clinging to the CV in 2026 is like keeping a fax machine because it technically still works.

What you'll learn:

→ Why the resume fails as a signal even when candidates are completely honest

→ What hiring signals actually predict performance versus which ones just feel rigorous

→ How to redesign your screening process around the outcomes you actually want

GUEST

Jeff Waldman — ScaleHR

LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffwaldmanhr/

YOUR HOSTS

Anita Chauhan — Fractional CMO, co-host

LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/in/anitachauhan/

⏱️ Chapters

00:17 – Meet Jeff Waldman (ScaleHR)

01:31 – Building global HR communities

03:06 – The biggest hiring mistake companies still make

06:38 – Why resumes are an outdated artifact

07:48 – AI resumes & “It belongs in a museum”

08:50 – Hidden bias: gaps, job hopping & “clean careers”

12:42 – AI, bias, and why prompting matters

14:01 – What hiring looks like without CVs

16:01 – Accessibility, choice & candidate experience

18:20 – Better hiring signals for 2026

20:09 – Final takeaways

LISTEN & FOLLOW

Spotify → https://open.spotify.com/show/0dbfz6y0tMq3crViHQD66H

Apple Podcasts → https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/id1625835562

All episodes → https://looksgoodonpaper.buzzsprout.com

WATCH ON YOUTUBE - https://youtu.be/qJakAdHG32o

POWERED BY WILLO

Hire humans, not resumes → https://www.willo.video/looks-good-on-paper

CONNECT WITH US

LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/company/10170893

If this episode changed how you think about hiring, share iy with one person who needs to hear it. And subscribe — we're rewriting the rules of hiring, one episode at a time.

Resumes fail as hiring signals not because candidates misrepresent themselves, but because the format measures the wrong things. Job titles, tenure, and company names are proxies for experience, not predictors of performance. In a market where AI has commoditised resume polish, the gap between what a resume signals and what a candidate can do has never been wider.

Show Resources

• Willo: willo.video - The most cost-effective way to screen candidates at scale. Interview candidates anywhere & at any time
• CV Free Toolkit: cvfree.me/join - Break up with the CV and get everything you need to modernize your hiring approach with skills-based assessments
• Anita Chauhan: linkedin.com/in/anitachauhan - Connect with the host

View Details

Startups don't need the person with the best title. They need the person who can do the work that exists right now — and probably three other things that don't have titles yet.

Most early-stage hiring fails because founders write job descriptions for the company they want to be, not the company they actually are. They hire for structure that doesn't exist yet and miss the generalists who could build it.

Sarah Sheikh, Chief of Staff at Loop Financial, has built and scaled teams inside the pressure of early-stage growth. In this episode of Looks Good on Paper, she shares why generalists consistently outperform specialists in startup environments, how task-forward hiring beats role-based hiring, and what most founders get catastrophically wrong when they're making their first critical hires.

What you'll learn:

→ Why generalists outperform specialists in early-stage environments

→ How to write a job description based on actual work, not imagined structure

→ The hiring mistakes that compound fastest in the first 10 hires

GUEST

Sarah Sheikh — Chief of Staff, Loop Financial

LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarahsheikh/

YOUR HOST

Anita Chauhan — Fractional CMO, host

LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/in/anitachauhan/

Chapters

00:00 Intro + Sarah’s role at Loop Financial

00:48 From fintech shutdown to startup “trial by fire”

01:54 Why startup life is glamorized (and what it’s really like)

02:57 What Loop does + how Chief of Staff connects to hiring

05:19 The biggest hiring mistake: planning by titles vs tasks

06:24 Quarterly “task audit”: automate, cut, or reassign work

07:16 The case for hiring generalists (and letting them specialize)

09:43 Hidden bias: “ex-[big company]” signal vs real work done

10:55 Tough interview questions + upfront expectations (hours, ambiguity)

12:20 Why fintech is hard in Canada (and why that matters for hiring)

13:59 “Get rid of CVs”: what Sarah would replace them with

14:51 Why LinkedIn tells you more than a resume

16:18 Why traditional screening breaks—and what video enables

16:53 The Catch-22: 279 applicants, limited time, and resume triage

17:45 “Death by tool” + what AI should actually do in hiring

18:12 AI mistakes: obvious copy/paste applications (and why they get rejected)

19:20 AI for applicants: searching roles faster + reducing busywork

19:50 AI for recruiters: smart sourcing tools (and what Sarah misses)

20:47 Practical sourcing: target companies + find proven generalists

21:35 Wrap-up + why Chief of Staff perspectives matter

LISTEN & FOLLOW

Spotify → https://open.spotify.com/show/0dbfz6y0tMq3crViHQD66H

Apple Podcasts → https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/id1625835562

All episodes → https://looksgoodonpaper.buzzsprout.com

WATCH ON YOUTUBE - https://youtu.be/3b08JzpBEzg

POWERED BY WILLO

Hire humans, not resumes → https://www.willo.video/looks-good-on-paper

CONNECT WITH US

LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/company/10170893

If this episode changed how you think about hiring, share it with one person who needs to hear it. And subscribe — we're rewriting the rules of hiring, one episode at a time.

Startup hiring fails most often when founders hire for the company they plan to become rather than the one they actually are. A job description written around a future org chart attracts candidates who need structure that doesn't exist yet — and filters out the adaptable generalists who could build it.

Show Resources

• Willo: willo.video - The most cost-effective way to screen candidates at scale. Interview candidates anywhere & at any time
• CV Free Toolkit: cvfree.me/join - Break up with the CV and get everything you need to modernize your hiring approach with skills-based assessments
• Anita Chauhan: linkedin.com/in/anitachauhan - Connect with the host

View Details

Getting diverse candidates in the door is the easy part. Keeping them is where most companies quietly fail — and they usually don't notice until the people they worked hardest to recruit have already left.

Diversity hiring without a retention strategy isn't equity. It's a pipeline with a hole in it. And the cost — in team morale, employer brand, and actual dollars — compounds every time it happens.

Gillian Emerson, Head of Talent and Partnerships at Toast, knows what a retention strategy actually looks like versus what gets put in a deck. In this episode of Looks Good on Paper, she breaks down why equity has to be embedded in systems and not just hiring goals, what flexibility really means to employees versus what companies think it means, and how to build teams that don't just represent diversity on paper.

What you'll learn:

→ Why diversity hiring without retention strategy produces churn, not equity

→ What flexibility actually means to employees versus what companies think it means

→ How to embed equity into hiring systems rather than just hiring targets

GUEST

Gillian Emerson — Head of Talent & Partnerships, Toast

LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/in/gillianemerson/

YOUR HOST

Anita Chauhan — Fractional CMO, host

LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/in/anitachauhan/

Episode Chapters

00:00 – Welcome & Gillian’s journey to Toast
01:40 – Building Toast’s recruiting function from scratch
03:50 – Why women leave tech—and why retention matters
04:50 – The biggest hiring mistake companies keep making
06:40 – Flexibility, choice, and return-to-office policies
09:00 – Rethinking how candidates are evaluated
11:00 – Why pedigree and big names can mislead hiring
13:30 – Hiring beyond resumes and “shiny” credentials
16:00 – How Toast experiments with different hiring approaches
17:30 – AI in hiring and its unintended consequences
19:00 – Hiring and recruiting trends for 2026

LISTEN & FOLLOW

Spotify → https://open.spotify.com/show/0dbfz6y0tMq3crViHQD66H

Apple Podcasts → https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/id1625835562

All episodes → https://looksgoodonpaper.buzzsprout.com

WATCH ON YOUTUBE - https://youtu.be/_w9ScoYMtCk

POWERED BY WILLO

Hire humans, not resumes → https://www.willo.video/looks-good-on-paper

CONNECT WITH US

LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/company/10170893

If this episode changed how you think about hiring, share it with one person who needs to hear it. And subscribe — we're rewriting the rules of hiring, one episode at a time.

Diversity hiring without a retention strategy is a pipeline with a hole in it. Companies that focus on diverse recruitment but haven't examined their promotion criteria, pay equity, flexibility policies, and management culture will keep losing the people they worked hardest to hire.

Show Resources

• Willo: willo.video - The most cost-effective way to screen candidates at scale. Interview candidates anywhere & at any time
• CV Free Toolkit: cvfree.me/join - Break up with the CV and get everything you need to modernize your hiring approach with skills-based assessments
• Anita Chauhan: linkedin.com/in/anitachauhan - Connect with the host

View Details

Headcount is not a growth strategy. But in high-pressure, high-growth environments, adding people feels like the most immediate lever — and it gets pulled too early, too often, and without enough clarity about what problem it's actually solving.

The companies that scale well don't just hire more. They hire differently. They have a clearer picture of what they're optimising for before they open a role, and they treat team design as a strategic question rather than a reactive one.

Mike Bettley, Senior Director of Talent at StackAdapt — one of Canada's most recognised high-growth adtech companies — has built and scaled hiring functions that have to perform under real pressure. In this episode of Looks Good on Paper, he breaks down what separates companies that scale cleanly from companies that bloat and stall, how to know when adding headcount will help versus when it will make things worse, and what a mature workforce planning process looks like before you're already in crisis mode.

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN

• The signals that tell you it's time to hire versus time to optimise
• How high-growth companies think about team design before opening a role
• The headcount planning practices that prevent over-hiring cycles

Guest:

Mike Bettley — Senior Director of Talent, StackAdapt

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelbettley/

Hosts: Anita Chauhan

High-growth companies that scale well treat headcount as a last resort, not a first response. Before opening a role, they ask what outcome the hire is meant to produce and whether that outcome can be achieved by redesigning how existing capacity is deployed. Companies that skip this question tend to over-hire, bloat their org, and face painful corrections 12 to 18 months later.

─── FOLLOW & CONNECT ───

If this changed how you think about hiring, follow the show — we're one episode per week.

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/SO5y6HAasME

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0dbfz6y0tMq3crViHQD66H

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/id1625835562

Try Willo — video interviewing for skills-based hiring: https://www.willo.video/looks-good-on-paper

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/10170893

RELATED TOPICS

Talent acquisition strategy, workforce planning, scaling teams, skills-based hiring, high-growth startups, future of work, HR strategy

Show Resources

• Willo: willo.video - The most cost-effective way to screen candidates at scale. Interview candidates anywhere & at any time
• CV Free Toolkit: cvfree.me/join - Break up with the CV and get everything you need to modernize your hiring approach with skills-based assessments
• Anita Chauhan: linkedin.com/in/anitachauhan - Connect with the host

View Details

What actually happens when you take the CV out of hiring? Eight leaders sat down with Looks Good on Paper over the course of Season 2 and didn't hold back.

The conversation covered AI-generated applications flooding pipelines, the bias baked into screening processes most companies refuse to audit, and the formats — video, work samples, structured conversations — that are actually surfacing better candidates. No one agreed on everything. But a clear through-line emerged.

This is the Season 2 supercut: the sharpest moments, the most honest takes, and the argument that kept coming up no matter who we were talking to — that the document we've built hiring around for 50 years is no longer fit for purpose, and the companies figuring out what replaces it are already pulling ahead.

What you'll learn:

→ What eight senior hiring leaders actually think about CVs in 2026

→ Which screening alternatives are producing better hires in practice

→ The through-line argument that connects every Season 2 conversation

YOUR HOSTS
Anita Chauhan — Fractional CMO, co-host

LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/in/anitachauhan/

Chapters

00:00 – The question that changes everything: What if CVs disappeared?

00:26 – Are CVs becoming “vanilla applications”?

00:43 – The biggest source of bias?

01:08 – Cover letters: loved, hated, or ignored

01:18 – CVs as protection vs. limitation

01:38 – What makes a candidate stand out

01:55 – Beyond experience: solving ambiguous problems

02:30 – Giving candidates choice & the rise of AI-guided screening

03:14 – The video tension: engagement vs. burden

03:40 – “If CVs were eliminated, I’d be thrilled.”

04:14 – Employers must evolve too

04:34 – What CVs miss—and why layering context matters

05:00 – Closing: Why progressive hiring teams are shifting now

LISTEN & FOLLOW

Spotify → https://open.spotify.com/show/0dbfz6y0tMq3crViHQD66H

Apple Podcasts → https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/id1625835562

All episodes → https://looksgoodonpaper.buzzsprout.com

WATCH ON YOUTUBE - https://youtu.be/JwHVk9QCtII

POWERED BY WILLO

Hire humans, not resumes → https://www.willo.video/looks-good-on-paper

CONNECT WITH US

LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/company/10170893

If this episode changed how you think about hiring, share it

with one person who needs to hear it. And subscribe — we're

rewriting the rules of hiring, one episode at a time.

The CV persists in hiring not because it works, but because it provides a defensible paper trail. Eight hiring leaders across Season 2 of Looks Good on Paper identified the same core problem: resumes measure credentials and presentation skill, not the capability to do the job. The formats replacing them — structured video, work samples, skills assessments — share one thing in common: they ask candidates to demonstrate something rather than describe it.

Show Resources

• Willo: willo.video - The most cost-effective way to screen candidates at scale. Interview candidates anywhere & at any time
• CV Free Toolkit: cvfree.me/join - Break up with the CV and get everything you need to modernize your hiring approach with skills-based assessments
• Anita Chauhan: linkedin.com/in/anitachauhan - Connect with the host

View Details

Hiring rarely fails because teams don't care. It fails because the decision gets made too fast, under too much pressure, by people who are already stretched thin. Reactive hiring doesn't just produce bad hires — it produces bad hires that everyone defends because there wasn't time to do it differently.

The moment you're hiring urgently is the moment your standards are most likely to slip and your biases are most likely to take over. Charisma reads as competence. Confidence reads as capability. And the hire that felt right in the moment becomes the problem six months later.

Tia Fomenoff, VP of People at PurposeMed, has spent her career building the people infrastructure that prevents these moments from happening. In this episode of Looks Good on Paper, she breaks down why charisma bias thrives in emergency conditions, how burnout distorts hiring judgment, and what proactive workforce planning actually looks like before you're scrambling to fill a gap.

What you'll learn:

→ Why reactive hiring amplifies bias even in well-intentioned teams

→ How charisma bias takes over when decisions are made under pressure

→ What proactive headcount planning looks like at an early-stage company

⏱ Episode Chapters

00:00 - Welcome & intro to Tia Fomenoff

00:47 - From nonprofit work to tech & people leadership

02:48 - Why Tia joined PurposeMed

03:41 - The biggest hiring mistake: waiting too long

05:25 - Reactive hiring, burnout, and exhausted leaders

06:09 - Planning proactively with hiring managers

07:47 - Hidden bias: charisma vs substance

09:56 - How introverted candidates get overlooked

10:50 - Can you remove CVs from hiring?

11:25 - Application questions, cover letters, and effort

13:10 - Offering candidates choice in interviews

14:45 - Hiring trends for 2026: AI with intention

16:40 - Long-term sourcing and building pipelines early

17:10 - Wrap-up and what's next

GUEST

Tia Fomenoff — VP of People, PurposeMed

LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/in/tiafomenoff/

YOUR HOSTS

Anita Chauhan — Fractional CMO, co-host

LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/in/anitachauhan/

LISTEN & FOLLOW

Spotify → https://open.spotify.com/show/0dbfz6y0tMq3crViHQD66H

Apple Podcasts → https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/id1625835562

All episodes → https://looksgoodonpaper.buzzsprout.com

WATCH ON YOUTUBE - https://youtu.be/-pQoGAfacxI

POWERED BY WILLO

Hire humans, not resumes → https://www.willo.video/looks-good-on-paper

CONNECT WITH US

LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/company/10170893

If this episode changed how you think about hiring, share it with one person who needs to hear it. And subscribe — we're rewriting the rules of hiring, one episode at a time.

Emergency hiring is where bias does its most damage. When a role needs to be filled urgently, interviewers under pressure default to charisma as a proxy for competence and confidence as a proxy for capability. Neither reliably predicts performance. The cost of a rushed hire almost always exceeds the cost of the gap it was meant to fill.

Show Resources

• Willo: willo.video - The most cost-effective way to screen candidates at scale. Interview candidates anywhere & at any time
• CV Free Toolkit: cvfree.me/join - Break up with the CV and get everything you need to modernize your hiring approach with skills-based assessments
• Anita Chauhan: linkedin.com/in/anitachauhan - Connect with the host

View Details

Most companies say they're open to global talent. Then they build a hiring process that makes it nearly impossible for global candidates to get through it — timezone-incompatible interview windows, slow communication loops, screening tools calibrated for a single market.

The 74% statistic isn't a mystery. It's the predictable result of companies applying a domestic hiring process to an international talent pool and wondering why the best candidates drop off.

Noelle Pittock, Senior Director of Onboarding and Business Operations at Remote, manages candidate pipelines at a scale most teams will never encounter — over 35,000 applicants a month. In this episode of Looks Good on Paper, she explains exactly where global hiring breaks down, what the minority of companies doing it well have figured out, and how to maintain a human candidate experience when your applicant volume is measured in the tens of thousands.

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN

• The most common failure points in international talent acquisition
• How to structure a hiring process that works across time zones and cultures
• The specific communication practices that separate high-performing distributed hiring teams from the rest

GUEST & HOSTS

Guest:

Noelle Pittock — Senior Director of Onboarding & Business Operations, Remote

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/noellepittock/

Host: Anita Chauhan

The most common reason global hiring fails is that companies apply a domestic process to an international candidate pool. Time zone friction, slow communication, and market-specific screening tools systematically filter out the candidates you most want to reach.

─── FOLLOW & CONNECT ───

If this changed how you think about hiring, follow the show — we're one episode per week.

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/y1WWUDElbp8

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0dbfz6y0tMq3crViHQD66H

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/id1625835562

Try Willo — video interviewing for skills-based hiring: https://www.willo.video/looks-good-on-paper

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/10170893

RELATED TOPICS

Remote work hiring, global talent acquisition, candidate experience, distributed team building, future of work, HR tech

Show Resources

• Willo: willo.video - The most cost-effective way to screen candidates at scale. Interview candidates anywhere & at any time
• CV Free Toolkit: cvfree.me/join - Break up with the CV and get everything you need to modernize your hiring approach with skills-based assessments
• Anita Chauhan: linkedin.com/in/anitachauhan - Connect with the host

View Details

Pay transparency isn't just an HR trend. It's a signal about what a company actually believes about fairness, trust, and who gets to negotiate. And most companies — even the ones who claim to value equity — are still building compensation structures that reward people who ask boldly rather than people who work well.

Cover letters have the same problem. They filter for people who know how to write cover letters, not people who can do the job. They measure a skill that's irrelevant to almost every role they gatekeep. Julia Fulton from Float has never read a cover letter and makes better hires because of it. In this episode of Looks Good on Paper, she talks pay transparency, the case for rewarding potential over pedigree, and why the hiring practices most companies treat as standard are quietly working against the outcomes they say they want.

What you'll learn:

→ Why pay transparency changes candidate behaviour and hiring quality

→ What companies lose by requiring cover letters

→ How to shift your hiring criteria from credential-based to potential-based

GUEST

Julia Fulton — Float

LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/in/juliafulton1/

YOUR HOST

Anita Chauhan — Fractional CMO, co-host

LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/in/anitachauhan/

⏱ Chapters

00:00 - Welcome & Intro to Julia Fulton

00:48 - Julia's path into TA & her human-first philosophy

02:15 - The #1 hiring mistake: lack of upfront compensation transparency

04:26 - Float's global async model & public Notion handbook

06:06 - "Same work, same pay" & building trust with candidates

07:29 - Why candidates return after rejection

08:03 - Hidden bias: hiring for perfection instead of growth potential

09:41 - Non-linear backgrounds, real skills & resourcefulness

10:56 - Imagining hiring without CVs (and the cover letter debate)

12:33 - Application questions, specificity & AI-proofing responses

13:49 - Loom videos, candidate friction & authentic storytelling

15:52 - How candidates show passion in different formats

17:23 - Role skills vs interview skills

18:12 - Using AI intentionally in the hiring process

20:37 - Meet BoBo the cat & closing thoughts

LISTEN & FOLLOW

Spotify → https://open.spotify.com/show/0dbfz6y0tMq3crViHQD66H

Apple Podcasts → https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/id1625835562

All episodes → https://looksgoodonpaper.buzzsprout.com

WATCH ON YOUTUBE - https://youtu.be/IupR-n3Wf2k

POWERED BY WILLO

Hire humans, not resumes → https://www.willo.video/looks-good-on-paper

CONNECT WITH US

LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/company/10170893

If this episode changed how you think about hiring, share it with one person who needs to hear it. And subscribe — we're rewriting the rules of hiring, one episode at a time.

Pay transparency changes who applies, who negotiates, and who accepts offers. When salary ranges are hidden, compensation outcomes correlate with negotiation confidence rather than performance or contribution.

Show Resources

• Willo: willo.video - The most cost-effective way to screen candidates at scale. Interview candidates anywhere & at any time
• CV Free Toolkit: cvfree.me/join - Break up with the CV and get everything you need to modernize your hiring approach with skills-based assessments
• Anita Chauhan: linkedin.com/in/anitachauhan - Connect with the host

View Details

The first 10% of most hiring processes produces almost no useful signal about whether a candidate can do the job. Resume screens sort for credentials. Referral filters sort for network proximity. Initial calls sort for presentation confidence. None of these reliably predict performance.

The result is a process that feels rigorous because it has many steps, but is actually optimised to reproduce whoever you already have.

Jim Miller, VP of People and Talent at Ashby — one of the most respected recruiting platforms in the market — has built hiring systems at companies across every stage of growth. In this episode of Looks Good on Paper, he breaks down why most hiring processes fail even when teams are trying hard, how over-reliance on employee referrals quietly narrows your talent pool, and what a genuinely structured interview process looks like versus what most companies think they're running.

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN

• The three most common places process bias enters a hiring funnel
• Why structured interviews consistently outperform unstructured ones
• How to audit your own hiring process for signals that actually predict performance

Guest:

Jim Miller — VP of People & Talent, Ashby

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm/

Host: Anita Chauhan

Structured interviews outperform unstructured ones because they evaluate every candidate against the same criteria, in the same order, with the same questions. Unstructured interviews optimise for how comfortable the interviewer feels — which is a measure of similarity, not capability.

─── FOLLOW & CONNECT ───

If this changed how you think about hiring, follow the show — we're one episode per week.

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/aQ8w2CmaCko

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0dbfz6y0tMq3crViHQD66H

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/id1625835562

Try Willo — video interviewing for skills-based hiring: https://www.willo.video/looks-good-on-paper

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/10170893

RELATED TOPICS

Structured hiring, talent acquisition strategy, skills-based hiring, reducing bias in recruitment, AI in HR, future of work

Show Resources

• Willo: willo.video - The most cost-effective way to screen candidates at scale. Interview candidates anywhere & at any time
• CV Free Toolkit: cvfree.me/join - Break up with the CV and get everything you need to modernize your hiring approach with skills-based assessments
• Anita Chauhan: linkedin.com/in/anitachauhan - Connect with the host

View Details

At 1,700 people, Clio is no longer a startup — but it still has to hire like one in the sense that matters most: every candidate interaction either builds or erodes trust in the company. Scaling talent acquisition without turning it into a processing machine is one of the harder operational problems in high-growth companies.

Most scaling teams solve for efficiency and lose the human in the process. Response times slow down, feedback disappears, and candidates start to feel like numbers. The best talent notices. And the best talent has options.

Alyssa-Marie Lefebre, Senior TA Specialist at Clio, lives this challenge daily at one of Canada's most recognized legaltech companies. In this episode of Looks Good on Paper, she talks through how Clio keeps recruiting human as it expands globally, the real difference between culture fit and culture add in practice, and what most talent teams get wrong when they try to scale without sacrificing quality.

What you'll learn:

→ How to maintain a human candidate experience as hiring volume grows

→ The operational practices that prevent talent acquisition from becoming a processing machine

→ What culture add looks like in practice at a company of 1,700 people

GUEST

Alyssa-Marie Lefebre — Senior TA Specialist, Clio

LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/in/alyssalefebre/

YOUR HOST

Anita Chauhan — Fractional CMO, co-host

LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/in/anitachauhan/

Chapters

00:00 – Intro & welcome

00:41 – Alyssa’s path into talent acquisition

02:11 – Clio’s scale, growth, and global expansion

03:12 – Culture add vs. culture fit

06:56 – Reassessing values and inclusivity at scale

09:19 – Hidden hiring bias: ambiguity in interviews

11:19 – Preparing candidates to show their best

13:02 – Should we remove CVs from hiring?

15:50 – Skills-based applications and equitable evaluation

20:40 – How to connect with Alyssa & closing thoughts

LISTEN & FOLLOW

Spotify → https://open.spotify.com/show/0dbfz6y0tMq3crViHQD66H

Apple Podcasts → https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/id1625835562

All episodes → https://looksgoodonpaper.buzzsprout.com

WATCH ON YOUTUBE - https://youtu.be/el-x477B9uo

POWERED BY WILLO

Hire humans, not resumes → https://www.willo.video/looks-good-on-paper

CONNECT WITH US

LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/company/10170893

If this episode changed how you think about hiring, share it with one person who needs to hear it. And subscribe — we're rewriting the rules of hiring, one episode at a time.

Scaling talent acquisition without losing the human element requires deliberate systems, not just good intentions. As hiring volume increases, the default is to optimise for speed — which degrades candidate communication, feedback quality, and the experience that shapes employer brand. The companies that scale well build those human touchpoints into process rather than leaving them to individual recruiter discretion.

Show Resources

• Willo: willo.video - The most cost-effective way to screen candidates at scale. Interview candidates anywhere & at any time
• CV Free Toolkit: cvfree.me/join - Break up with the CV and get everything you need to modernize your hiring approach with skills-based assessments
• Anita Chauhan: linkedin.com/in/anitachauhan - Connect with the host

View Details

Early-stage founders make the same hiring mistakes with striking consistency: they hire for the role they can describe rather than the work they actually need done, they over-index on pedigree because it feels safe, and they underestimate how much the first five hires shape everything that follows.

AI has made this harder. When every candidate can generate a polished application, traditional credentials are even weaker as signals. The question of what qualified means has shifted — and most job descriptions haven't caught up.

Alison Kaizer from Golden Ventures works with early-stage founders on some of their most consequential decisions. In this episode of Looks Good on Paper, she explains why startups keep getting early hires wrong, how the definition of qualified is changing as AI aptitude becomes a baseline expectation, and what CV-free and structured interview approaches can surface that traditional screening misses entirely.

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN

• The most common early-stage hiring mistakes and how to avoid them
• What to look for in candidates when AI has commoditised polish
• How structured interviews change what you can actually evaluate in first-stage screening

Guest:

Alison Kaizer — Golden Ventures

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alisonkaizer/

Hosts: Anita Chauhan

The most common mistake early-stage founders make in hiring is optimising for credentials that feel safe rather than capabilities the business actually needs. The first five hires disproportionately shape culture, process, and trajectory — and pedigree is a poor proxy for the adaptability and execution speed startups require.

─── FOLLOW & CONNECT ───

If this changed how you think about hiring, follow the show — we're one episode per week.

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/CWrZN8cAoWk

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0dbfz6y0tMq3crViHQD66H

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/id1625835562

Try Willo — video interviewing for skills-based hiring: https://www.willo.video/looks-good-on-paper

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/10170893

RELATED TOPICS

Startup hiring, skills-first hiring, AI in recruitment, future of work, talent acquisition strategy, skills-based hiring

Show Resources

• Willo: willo.video - The most cost-effective way to screen candidates at scale. Interview candidates anywhere & at any time
• CV Free Toolkit: cvfree.me/join - Break up with the CV and get everything you need to modernize your hiring approach with skills-based assessments
• Anita Chauhan: linkedin.com/in/anitachauhan - Connect with the host

View Details

What if your best hire lists 4 years on paper, but delivers 8 years of outcomes?

Miovision’s Global Talent Acquisition Manager Justin Krulicki, breaks down why tenure and industry bias are quietly derailing your hiring process, and how a 90-second video intro can beat a CV before you even read it.

In this episode you’ll learn:

• Why “years served” is a weak signal, and what better metrics to use

• How to cleanly structure interviews into Technical ▪ People ▪ Values (without overlapping)

• Why we asked for 90-second intros in one real req: 5,000 resumes. Zero portfolios. Three videos. Only the videos got callbacks

• How well-trained interviewers (not repeating the same question six times) prevent groupthink

• What a “no-CV” future could feel like, and how AI might soon rank those intros before you open a resume

🎧 Listen on Spotify
Watch on Youtube

Connect with Justin Krulicki
Linkedin

About Miovision
Miovision builds intelligent mobility solutions that help cities optimize traffic in real time. Think AI + camera systems + computer vision to understand movement across cars, cycles, and pedestrians.

About Looks Good on Paper / Willo
Looks Good on Paper is our interview-first podcast. It surfaces practical operator lenses for hiring, team building, and leadership. Powered by Willo.

⏱️ Chapters

00:00 — Outcomes over years
00:28 — The real cost of tenure & pedigree bias
02:00 — Passion & outcomes as hiring currency
02:35 — Avoiding bias: measure tech / people / values
03:45 — Trained interviewers vs. groupthink
07:00 — No-CV intake: 90-second intros & the 5,000-resumes story
11:20 — Tooling: ATS, AI & video-first recruiting
13:20 — Wrap & next steps

Show Resources

• Willo: willo.video - The most cost-effective way to screen candidates at scale. Interview candidates anywhere & at any time
• CV Free Toolkit: cvfree.me/join - Break up with the CV and get everything you need to modernize your hiring approach with skills-based assessments
• Anita Chauhan: linkedin.com/in/anitachauhan - Connect with the host

View Details

What if your best hire doesn’t “fit” your culture—they add to it?

Microsoft Canada’s Kree Govender shares a practical stack you can try this month:

• hire culture add (not clones),
• test with the Three A’s: Attitude, Aptitude, Assimilation (to change),
• run STAR interviews with independent panels to avoid groupthink,
• use AI tools like Microsoft Copilot to surface hidden bias,
• and swap vanilla CVs for 90-second video/audio intros that actually show how people think.

In this episode you’ll learn:

• How to design for culture add and positive tension on purpose
• The Three A’s hiring lens (Attitude, Aptitude, Assimilation)
• Why STAR + independent interviewers raise signal and reduce bias
• How Copilot helps measure (not guess) interviewer bias
• When a 90-second intro beats a CV for early screening

Watch on Youtube

Chapters
00:00 Cold open — “Stop hiring your mirror”
00:26 Culture add vs culture fit (and why tension helps)
02:05 The Three A’s: Attitude, Aptitude, Assimilation (to change)
03:30 STAR interviews + independent panels (no groupthink)
05:00 Don’t guess bias—instrument it with Copilot
06:45 CVs → 90-second video/audio (what to ask for)
08:50 Leadership: Create Clarity • Generate Energy • Deliver Success
10:30 Model • Coach • Care in practice
12:20 What to pilot this month + wrap

Try one tactic this month and tell us what changed: 90-sec intro videos, STAR-only prompts, or independent panels?

👉 Watch and Subscribe for operator-grade hiring conversations here, or on Youtube.

Resources
• Willo — screen smarter at scale: https://willo.video
• Connect with the host, Anita Chauhan (Willo)
• Guest: Kree Govender, SMB Canada Leader @ Microsoft

Share this with a leader who still starts with CVs.

Show Resources

• Willo: willo.video - The most cost-effective way to screen candidates at scale. Interview candidates anywhere & at any time
• CV Free Toolkit: cvfree.me/join - Break up with the CV and get everything you need to modernize your hiring approach with skills-based assessments
• Anita Chauhan: linkedin.com/in/anitachauhan - Connect with the host

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Anuj Rastogi is a sales and revenue leader turned talent strategist who helps purpose-driven founders and HR leaders scale their teams. As Managing Director at BackStretch, he's seen firsthand how companies unknowingly sabotage their hiring by chasing the "obvious" candidate. In this conversation, Anuj breaks down the three critical hiring mistakes that even progressive companies make—and why the person who looks perfect on paper is often the wrong choice.

From a retail worker who became a top sales performer to developers hired without degrees who outperformed their credentialed peers, Anuj shares real stories that challenge everything we think we know about qualifications. He explains why job descriptions miss 97% of what the work actually entails, why hiring sequence matters as much as who you hire, and how the easy-apply era has created a volume crisis that's drowning out genuine talent. His advice? Stop optimizing for speed and start optimizing for the human connection that reveals true capability.

If you've ever wondered whether that stack of 1,000 applications is actually helping you find better people—or just creating more noise—this episode will make you rethink your entire approach. Anuj doesn't just critique the broken system; he offers a practical path forward that balances technology with the irreplaceable value of human judgment. Whether you're a founder building your first team or a talent leader drowning in resumes, this conversation will shift how you think about who deserves a shot.

Connect with Anuj Rastogi:

• Anuj Rastogi: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anujrastogi13/ - Managing Director at Backstretch, helping purpose-driven companies build resilient talent pipelines
• BackStretch: https://backstretch.biz/ - Talent strategy firm focused on quality hiring and proactive search
• YENZA3: https://www.yenza3.com/ - Guiding organizations on people-centric AI and knowledge transformations

Show Resources

• Willo: willo.video - The most cost-effective way to screen candidates at scale. Interview candidates anywhere & at any time
• CV Free Toolkit: cvfree.me/join - Break up with the CV and get everything you need to modernize your hiring approach with skills-based assessments
• Anita Chauhan: linkedin.com/in/anitachauhan - Connect with the host

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Daneal Charney is a fractional HR executive and leadership coach who has seen hundreds of tech companies navigate their hiring challenges. After 10 years in the Toronto tech ecosystem, including her role as Executive in Residence at MaRS, she now helps fast-growth companies build high-performing leadership teams. In this episode, she breaks down the three biggest hiring mistakes that keep companies stuck in broken patterns.

Daneal reveals why we consistently hire based on what we can see rather than what actually drives performance - the motivation and mindset that exist "below the iceberg." She shares why hiring before you're organizationally ready sets everyone up for failure, and tackles the controversial topic of hiring from your personal network. Her insights on CEO bias in hiring decisions and the importance of defining success criteria will change how you think about building your team.

From a medical company's innovative panel interview approach that led to a 15-year hire, to frameworks for identifying the drivers and motivations that predict long-term success, Daneal provides actionable strategies for better hiring decisions. She also weighs in on emerging tools like one-way video interviews that can reveal communication patterns and behavioral signals traditional methods miss.

Connect with Daneal Charney:

• LinkedIn Profile - Fractional HR Executive and Leadership Coach specializing in fast-growth tech companies https://www.linkedin.com/in/danealcharney
• MaRS Discovery District - Toronto innovation hub where Daneal served as Executive in Residence https://www.marsdd.com

Show Resources

• Willo: willo.video - The most cost-effective way to screen candidates at scale. Interview candidates anywhere & at any time
• CV Free Toolkit: cvfree.me/join - Break up with the CV and get everything you need to modernize your hiring approach with skills-based assessments
• Anita Chauhan: linkedin.com/in/anitachauhan - Connect with the host

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What happens when 9 of Canada’s top hiring leaders get brutally honest about bias? During Tech for Canada Conference, we captured raw, unfiltered insights from executives at Microsoft, Deloitte, True Search, and more. From “pedigree bias” to companies getting “completely blindsided” by famous names, these behind-the-scenes conversations reveal the hidden forces sabotaging your talent strategy.

The most eye-opening revelations include: Simon De Baene (Workleap) admitting companies get “completely blindsided” by famous company names, Marianne Bulger (True Search) breaking down the “pedigree trap,” and Yauhan Mehta sharing hard truths about elite education bias. Meanwhile, Anuj Rastogi (Backstretch) delivers the ultimate reality check: “Often the best hire is not the one that was most obvious.”

This exclusive supercut compilation features candid moments captured during Tech for Canada Conference interviews, giving you a preview of the powerful conversations coming in Season 2 of Looks Good on Paper - launching this month! If you’re ready to break up with the CV and discover what really matters in hiring, these insights will change how you think about talent forever.

Featured Leaders:

• Yauhan Mehta: Deloitte - Consultant
• Katrin Kourtoff: Big Viking Games - VP of Talent
• Kree Govender: Microsoft - SMB Canada Area Lead
• Anuj Rastogi: Backstretch - Managing Director
• Marianne Bulger: True Search - Partner
• Sarah Blackmore: Riipen - Talent Acquisition Professional
• Andy Claremont: Glide - Head of Ecosystem & Community
• Simon De Baene: Workleap - Co-founder & CEO
• Amir Tavafi: Abloomify - Co-founder & CEO

Watch the video version of this podcast on YouTube: https://youtu.be/dDPDXg-HSYQ?si=il1pVFl1ECK00URB

Season 2 launches this month!

Special Thanks:

• StartWell for providing their incredible studio space for us to capture these interviews in-person: https://startwell.co
• Cameron Suorsa for expert video podcast editing since the start of season one:

Show Resources

• Willo: willo.video - The most cost-effective way to screen candidates at scale. Interview candidates anywhere & at any time
• CV Free Toolkit: cvfree.me/join - Break up with the CV and get everything you need to modernize your hiring approach with skills-based assessments
• Anita Chauhan: linkedin.com/in/anitachauhan - Connect with the host

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David Hiford, Lead Talent Acquisition at Hitachi Rail, challenges the dangerous assumption that experience always equals competence. With nearly four years in recruitment across New Zealand and the UK, David has witnessed firsthand how companies miss out on exceptional talent by refusing to consider career switchers, from engineers becoming project managers to military personnel transitioning to civilian roles.

In this episode, David reveals the hidden conformity bias that's creating homogenous workforces and limiting organizational strength. He shares why hiring managers gravitate toward candidates who mirror their own educational backgrounds and experience, particularly in industries like finance where Russell Group university preferences still dominate decision-making. David's insights on unconscious bias training and the importance of acknowledging our inherent biases provide a roadmap for more inclusive hiring practices.

David's surprising hire story perfectly illustrates his philosophy of prioritizing potential over paper credentials. His approach to spotting talent comes down to one fundamental question: "Do you feel like this is a good person?" This human-centered perspective, combined with skills-based assessment tools, has helped him build stronger, more diverse teams at Hitachi Rail while navigating the complexities of organizational mergers and transformations.

Resources Mentioned

• David Hiford: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidhiford/ - Lead Talent Acquisition at Hitachi Rail
• Hitachi Rail: https://www.hitachirail.com/ - Global rail solutions and technology company

Show Resources

• Willo: willo.video - The most cost-effective way to screen candidates at scale. Interview candidates anywhere & at any time
• CV Free Toolkit: cvfree.me/join - Break up with the CV and get everything you need to modernize your hiring approach with skills-based assessments
• Anita Chauhan: linkedin.com/in/anitachauhan - Connect with the host

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Derek Polowyj from Eden Scott brings a unique perspective to hiring, having studied recruitment as part of his graduate apprenticeship while working full-time in deep technology recruitment. His academic approach combined with real-world experience recruiting for everything from space tech to AI companies gives him fascinating insights into why traditional hiring keeps failing.

Derek reveals the "red pen exercise" that transforms bloated job descriptions into focused requirements, exposing how most companies haven't actually identified what they need versus what they want. He breaks down the dangerous combination of network bias and affinity bias that's quietly undermining diversity efforts, even in companies that think they're progressive. From one-page CVs to buzzword-filled personal profiles, Derek explains why our current approach to CVs is fundamentally broken.

The conversation takes a powerful turn when Derek shares the story of an overseas engineer whose CV was full of "red flags" but became one of the best hires his client ever made. It's a compelling reminder that the most surprising successes often come from candidates who don't look good on paper but have incredible stories to tell when given the chance.

Resources Mentioned

• Derek Polowyj: https://linkedin.com/in/derek-polowyj - Recruitment specialist at Eden Scott focusing on deep technologies sector
• Eden Scott: https://edenscott.com - Scotland's largest independent recruitment agency operating across 12+ sectors including renewable energy, deep tech, and professional services

Show Resources

• Willo: willo.video - The most cost-effective way to screen candidates at scale. Interview candidates anywhere & at any time
• CV Free Toolkit: cvfree.me/join - Break up with the CV and get everything you need to modernize your hiring approach with skills-based assessments
• Anita Chauhan: linkedin.com/in/anitachauhan - Connect with the host

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Joshua Sklüt, Chief People Officer and co-founder of MyStandard, joins us to discuss how traditional hiring methods are fundamentally broken. As the creator of the first employment and talent acquisition service built on Web3 technology, Josh argues that platforms like LinkedIn have become "the Tinder of recruiting" - focusing on superficial details rather than actual ability to do the job.

Josh reveals the biggest hiring mistakes companies make, from reactive hiring decisions driven by desperation to unconscious biases that limit talent pools. He shares powerful insights about how diversity improves business quality - not just for social responsibility, but for bottom-line results. The conversation covers why companies unknowingly perpetuate hiring biases even when they believe they're progressive, and how verification of candidates can transform the entire interview process.

The episode culminates with Josh's surprising hire story about bringing on a quadriplegic team member who became an invaluable employee, challenging preconceptions about ability and cultural fit. His wildcard response about abolishing resumes focuses on skills assessments as the only information that truly matters - a philosophy that drives MyStandard's encrypted, candidate-controlled platform where companies pay candidates directly for access to their verified professional data.

Resources Mentioned:

• Joshua's LinkedIn: Chief People Officer and co-founder of MyStandard
• MyStandard: Web3-powered employment platform giving candidates control of their professional data

Studies & Examples Referenced

• Bertrand-Mullainathan Study (2004): American Economic Review research showing identical resumes with white-sounding names (Emily, Greg) vs. African American names (Lakisha, Jamal) resulted in 50% more callbacks for white applicants (Josh referenced this as a "New York Times study" in the episode, but the actual research was published in the American Economic Review)
• Ivy League Hiring Bias - Example of companies that "only hired out of Ivy League schools" blocking 90% of qualified candidates
• Quadriplegic Employee Success Story - Josh's experience hiring a wheelchair-using employee who became an invaluable team member, challenging assumptions about ability and cultural fit

Show Resources

• Willo: willo.video - The most cost-effective way to screen candidates at scale. Interview candidates anywhere & at any time
• CV Free Toolkit: cvfree.me/join - Break up with the CV and get everything you need to modernize your hiring approach with skills-based assessments
• Anita Chauhan: linkedin.com/in/anitachauhan - Connect with the host

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Adam Gellert, founder of Linkus Group and the talent marketplace Hipo (previously HiredHippo), joins us to share insights from his two decades in the recruiting space. With a mission to build the greatest marketplace of pre-vetted diverse, high-potential candidates, Adam is reshaping the job application process with a focus on candidate experience. His expertise spans from helping startups hire their first employee to supporting companies scaling to 250+ people.
In this eye-opening conversation, Adam reveals why speed is the biggest hiring mistake companies make, explaining how rushing to fill positions without proper planning leads to poor outcomes. He challenges conventional hiring wisdom, arguing that recruiting is about getting "the best possible person, in the fastest amount of time, for the lowest cost" - and that companies don't need to compromise on any of these factors when they plan properly. Adam discusses how unconscious biases prevent organizations from recognizing great talent, and explains why the future of recruiting will be less about sourcing and more about consulting on fit and retention.
Adam shares compelling insights about surprising hires that defied conventional expectations, including candidates who started at $70K salaries and eventually commanded $500K. This episode challenges listeners to reconsider their hiring processes, recognize the limitations of what "looks good on paper," and embrace a more nuanced approach to identifying high-potential talent that can transform organizations.

Resources Mentioned

• Adam's Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamgellert
• Linkus Group: https://www.linkusgroup.com - Recruiting agency for hard-to-fill roles
• Hipo: https://hirehipo.com - Talent marketplace for high-potential candidates

Show Resources

• Willo: willo.video - The most cost-effective way to screen candidates at scale. Interview candidates anywhere & at any time
• CV Free Toolkit: cvfree.me/join - Break up with the CV and get everything you need to modernize your hiring approach with skills-based assessments
• Anita Chauhan: linkedin.com/in/anitachauhan - Connect with the host

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In this provocative episode of 'Looks Good on Paper,' hosts Woody and Anita explore the demise of the traditional job advertisement with Christine Spagnuolo, founder of The Sorelle Group and a veteran headhunter with 18 years of experience. Christine boldly declares job ads a "waste of time" and "outdated, broken system," explaining why she hasn't posted one in over a decade.

Christine dismantles the "post and pray" approach, revealing how it creates fatigue for both employers and candidates, especially in today's world where AI generates both job descriptions and applications. She argues that truly exceptional talent isn't browsing job boards - they must be directly pursued. The conversation delves into why internal recruitment teams struggle compared to agency headhunters, and makes a compelling case for commission-based incentives in corporate recruiting.

The discussion exposes hidden biases in hiring processes, with Christine sharing memorable career stories - including placing identical twins without interviews and seeing her first-ever placement climb to department head at Ferrero Rocher. The episode concludes with Christine's forward-thinking perspective that relationships and personal endorsements are already replacing CVs in progressive industries, particularly in tech startups where her recommendations alone secure interviews without traditional resumes.

Resources Mentioned

• Christine Spagnuolo: linkedin.com/in/christinespagnuolo - Senior recruitment consultant with 10+ years experience helping companies focus on skills and potential rather than traditional CVs.
• The Sorelle Group: thesorellegroup.com - Boutique recruitment consultancy specializing in relationship-based talent sourcing across North America, the Caribbean, and Hong Kong.

Show Resources

• Willo: willo.video - The most cost-effective way to screen candidates at scale. Interview candidates anywhere & at any time
• CV Free Toolkit: cvfree.me/join - Break up with the CV and get everything you need to modernize your hiring approach with skills-based assessments
• Anita Chauhan: linkedin.com/in/anitachauhan - Connect with the host

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We sit down with Martin Hauck, a fractional HR consultant at the Purple Umbrella and the founder of the People People Group, a community of 5,000+ HR, recruitment, and operations professionals across North America. Martin brings his extensive experience in reimagining recruitment processes and building supportive HR communities.

In this episode, we explore why traditional hiring practices often fail and how companies can make meaningful improvements to their recruitment strategies. Martin shares insights on why companies keep making the same hiring mistakes even when they clearly aren't working, and how inherited bad habits perpetuate throughout organizations.

We discuss the critical importance of auditing and modernizing hiring approaches, the hidden biases that even progressive companies unknowingly harbor, and the revolutionary concept of treating candidates as customers. Martin highlights the Virgin Media case study, where poor candidate experience cost the company millions annually, and shares practical strategies for creating more thoughtful, structured, and candidate-centered recruitment processes that pay dividends in the long term.

Resources Mentioned

• Virgin Media Case Study: How poor candidate experience cost Virgin Media £4.4 million ($5.4 million) annually and the steps they took to turn it around.

Connect with Martin Hauck

• LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/martinhauck
• Podcast: From A People Perspective - Martin's podcast about fascinating professionals in HR and recruitment
• Community: The People People Group - A 5,000+ member community for HR, recruitment, and operations professionals
• Company: Purple Umbrella - A fractional HR and recruitment consultancy

Show Resources

• Willo: willo.video - The most cost-effective way to screen candidates at scale. Interview candidates anywhere & at any time
• CV Free Toolkit: cvfree.me/join - Break up with the CV and get everything you need to modernize your hiring approach with skills-based assessments
• Anita Chauhan: linkedin.com/in/anitachauhan - Connect with the host

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We sit down with Theo Smith, celebrated recruiter and co-founder of Neurodiversity World, a company that helps clients create inclusive and thriving neuro inclusive work environments. Theo is also an award-winning author of Neurodiversity at Work, a LinkedIn Top Voice, and a podcast host of Neurodiversity with Theo Smith, where he share lived experiences and expertise on neurodiversity.

In this episode, we deep dive into how recruiters and talent leaders can help create a better process for those who are facing challenges, how to use AI to support the hiring process (especially for those who are neurodivergent) and what happens when you really understand a hire and set them up for success.

We discuss the common pitfalls in traditional hiring processes, emphasizing the importance of focusing on skills, potential, and real-world experience over 'perfect' CVs. Theo highlights the desperate measures candidates resort to and the critical need for companies to provide opportunities that showcase true abilities. We also delve into hidden biases in seemingly progressive hiring practices and the importance of effective onboarding. The discussion wraps up with advice on using AI responsibly in recruitment. Tune in to challenge conventional hiring norms and gain insights into creating a more inclusive and effective recruiting process.

Resources Mentioned

Theo Smith's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/theosmithuk

Theo's Book "Neurodiversity at Work": https://www.amazon.com/Neurodiversity-Work-Performance-Productivity-Neurodiverse/dp/1398600261

Theo's GPT Ad Decoder: https://www.neuromine.co.uk/job-ad-decoder

Goblin Tools: https://goblin.tools

Show Resources

• Willo: willo.video - The most cost-effective way to screen candidates at scale. Interview candidates anywhere & at any time
• CV Free Toolkit: cvfree.me/join - Break up with the CV and get everything you need to modernize your hiring approach with skills-based assessments
• Anita Chauhan: linkedin.com/in/anitachauhan - Connect with the host

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Welcome to Looks Good on Paper! The podcast that's flipping the script on traditional hiring. Join hosts Anita Chauhan and Andrew "Woody" Wood as we explore, prod, and encourage a deeper look into current hiring practices (and learn from the greats along the way!).

In this introductory episode, we set the stage for the podcast's mission by discussing why CVs—dating back to 1483—and the so-called "perfect candidate" can be misleading. We break down three core issues with traditional CV-focused hiring: they're inherently inaccurate (with 75% of people embellishing their experience), they're subject to significant observer bias, and they're increasingly being generated by AI.

Throughout this series, we'll be speaking with industry experts to uncover how skills, potential, real-world experience, and adaptability should be the focus when making hiring decisions. Our goal isn't to eliminate CVs entirely, but to help organizations move away from outdated hiring models toward a more holistic approach to recruitment that identifies the whole person behind that piece of paper.

Tune in twice monthly for concise, actionable conversations that will help you challenge the norm and rewrite the rules of hiring.

Make sure to subscribe below!

Show Resources

• Willo: willo.video - The most cost-effective way to screen candidates at scale. Interview candidates anywhere & at any time
• CV Free Toolkit: cvfree.me/join - Break up with the CV and get everything you need to modernize your hiring approach with skills-based assessments
• Anita Chauhan: linkedin.com/in/anitachauhan - Connect with the host

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In this episode of the Recruitment Reality Podcast, I am joined by Artimese Braddy Lawrence, Coordinator of Human Resources at Tyler ISD, the largest school district in Northeast Texas.

Artimese discusses the broad range of recruitment responsibilities in the school district, from hiring teachers to custodial staff and bus drivers. Within the educational sector there are some unique challenges, including finding quality candidates who are genuinely interested in working with children.

We explore strategies for attracting potential candidates, such as utilizing social media, incentives, community partnerships, and emphasizing the district's family-oriented environment. Additionally, the conversation touches on the role of technology, specifically AI, in the recruitment process and the importance of maintaining human elements in human resources. Her advice to candidates was to research the company that you are applying to and to not hide your personality in your interviews.

Watch on YouTube RESOURCES:

► Willo: Video Interview Screening Software
► Andrew Wood, COO & Co-founder at Willo
► Tyler ISD: Largest School District in Northeast Texas
► Artimese Braddy Lawrence, Coordinator of Human Resources at Tyler ISD

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In this episode of the Recruitment Reality Podcast, I am joined by Joe Atkinson, Founder at PURPL, a peer-to-peer learning platform built by talent acquisition for talent acquisition professionals. They specialize in upskilling recruiters with practical, time-efficient & industry relevant training.

The episode delves into Joe's journey from his passion for startups to identifying a gap in professional training for recruiters. PURPL emerges as a solution, offering a platform for recruiters to upskill by learning from top professionals in the tech world. Joe shares insights on the challenges in talent acquisition, the lack of data literacy, and stakeholder management. The discussion also covers how PURPL sources its creators, their motivations, and the unique approach to content authenticity and learnability.

In facing economic downturns with massive tech layoffs, PURPL began assisting displaced professionals by offering free trainings to enhance their employability for their next role. Looking ahead, Joe outlines plans to engage a broader segment of the recruitment industry, emphasizing the importance of fundamental skills. The episode concludes with valuable advice for aspiring entrepreneurs and recruiters.

Watch on YouTube RESOURCES:

► Willo: Video Interview Screening Software
► Andrew Wood, COO & Co-founder at Willo
► PURPL: Peer-to-Peer Learning Platform for Talent Acquisition
► Joe Atkinson, Founder at PURPL

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In this episode of the Recruitment Reality Podcast, I am joined by Robert Garner, Director at Abstraction Labs, a recruitment website design & development firm. We discuss his transition from a career in recruitment to becoming a software developer and eventually starting his own web design business.

Robert shares his diverse experiences, from selling recruitment advertising and working in media recruitment to launching a job board and moving into talent acquisition and software development, focusing on recruitment CRM systems. He delves into the challenges he faced early on trying to launch his own software platform, the pivotal role of self-teaching and online learning resources in his career shift, and gives advice for effective cold calling.

Robert also provides insights into the current state of the recruitment market, the importance of business development, and utilizing AI and automation. Additionally, he offers valuable advice for recruitment agencies on improving their websites, emphasizing the use of 3 easy things you can do today to assess your website:

1. Perform the Google Lighthouse performance test
2. Ensure Mobile Responsiveness of your pages
3. Incorporate high quality Images and Videos

Watch on YouTube

RESOURCES MENTIONED:
► Willo: Video Interview Screening Software
► Andrew Wood, COO & Co-founder at Willo
► Abstraction Labs: Recruitment Website Design & Development
► Robert Garner, Managing Director at Abstraction Labs
► The Challenger Sale, a book about taking control of the customer conversation
► The Jelly Effect, a book about how to make your communication stick

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In this episode of the Recruitment Reality Podcast, I am joined by Ahva Sadeghi, CEO/Co-founder at Symba, an innovative onboarding and talent management platform. She highlights how Symba has grown from its initial conception of remote internships to focusing on new hire readiness in order to allow individuals to be productive from day one.

She shares insights into the challenges faced during the initial years of launching her startup and how customer feedback played a crucial role in expanding the product's capabilities. Ahva emphasizes the importance of forming a strong team, providing a great onboarding experience, the impacts of a company's culture on its growth, and the need to constantly learn and adapt.

Avha’s first piece of advice for listeners was that when receiving feedback, you should only implement wisdom that resonates with you from people you respect. She also shared advice that one of her mentors gave her, which was that you should make sure that everyone that comes into contact with your company is better off because of it.

Watch on YouTube

RESOURCES MENTIONED:

• Willo: Video Interview Screening Software https://www.willo.video
• Andrew Wood, COO & Co-founder at Willo https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-douglas-wood
• Symba: The Go-To Platform for New Hire Readiness https://symba.io
• Ahva Sadeghi, CEO & Co-founder at Symba https://www.linkedin.com/in/ahvasadeghi

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In this episode of the Recruitment Reality Podcast, I am joined by Dace Straupmane, a Talent Acquisition Manager at SmartLynx, an aviation lending company (think of them as the B2B ‘Uber of aviation’). We discussed SmartLynx’s unique business model and recruitment strategies, specifically how they have had success attracting global talent by valuing candidate’s potential over experience. This has allowed them to invest in junior talents and attract talent from other industries (such as banking).

Filling technical roles is a challenge, but SmartLynx has leveraged technology like Willo into their hiring workflow to streamline identification of driven candidates from around the world. Valuing diversity and inclusion in the workplace, Dace mentioned how she has seen her colleagues break role stereotypes. They have so many ladies working as engineers and serving in leading roles of their technical departments.

Woody shared his view that the employee of the future is one that knows how to do their job with the help of AI. Dace also has a positive view of AI for both candidates & recruiters, citing it as a huge time saver with efficiency that reduces stress in the workplace. She wraps up by urging recruiters to leverage modern technologies and candidates to take the time to prepare and communicate throughout the whole interview process.

Watch on YouTube

RESOURCES MENTIONED:

• Willo: Video Interview Screening Software https://www.willo.video
• Dace Straupmane, Talent Acquisition Manager at SmartLynx https://www.linkedin.com/in/dacestraupmane
• Andrew Wood, COO & Co-founder at Willo https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-douglas-wood
• SmartLynx: aviation lending company https://www.smartlynx.aero

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In this episode of the Recruitment Reality Podcast, I am joined by Yasmin Castle, a Talent Acquisition Specialist at Ideagen, a global software company based in Nottingham built for regulated and high-compliance industries. We discussed Ideagen’s hiring methods, early career programs, and the challenges of global recruitment with the varying market trends in the UK and India.

One of Ideagen’s early career programs, ‘Think Big,’ incentivizes high schoolers with opportunities to enter the workforce directly without a college degree. Yasmin highlights some challenges with assessing a significant number of candidates while still providing them with meaningful feedback and how Willo has helped them streamline these processes.

We explored the effectiveness and impact of artificial intelligence adoption in recruitment and the workplace. We also delved into the importance of feedback and company culture in shaping a company’s employer branding. Yasmin ended the interview by sharing some key advice for recruitment professionals and job applicants.

Watch on YouTube

RESOURCES MENTIONED:

• Willo: Video Interview Screening Software https://www.willo.video
• Yasmin Castle, Talent Acquisition Specialist at Ideagen https://www.linkedin.com/in/yasmin-castle-6858751a9
• Andrew Wood, COO & Co-founder at Willo https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-douglas-wood
• Ideagen: Software Company for Regulated High Compliance Industries https://ideagen.com
• iCIMS: Applicant Tracking System https://www.icims.com
• Oktopost: B2B Social Media Management Solutions https://www.oktopost.com

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In this episode of the Recruitment Reality Podcast, I am joined by Rosa Hilmi, the co-founder and managing director of Stellar Select, a niche recruitment consultancy specializing in the lending sector. Rosa shares her insights and experiences in the industry, highlighting the importance of having a strong USP and niche focus in a tough market.

Rosa emphasizes the need for recruiters to prioritize the candidate experience and truly listen to their needs and preferences. She discusses the value of providing honest feedback to candidates, even if it's not the news they were hoping for, as it builds trust and fosters long-term relationships. We also discuss the impact of automation and technology on improving the candidate journey and ensuring a seamless recruitment process.

Overall, Rosa's advice to recruiters is to stay positive, adapt to market changes, and focus on building strong relationships with candidates. By prioritizing the candidate experience and maintaining a niche focus, recruiters can thrive in a challenging market and secure long-term success.

Watch on YouTube

RESOURCES MENTIONED:

• Willo: Video Interview Screening Software https://www.willo.video
• Rosa Hilmi, Managing Director at Stellar Select https://www.linkedin.com/in/rosa-hilmi-72749414
• Andrew Wood, COO & Co-founder at Willo https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-douglas-wood
• Stellar Select: Specialists in Mortgage and Financial Services Recruitment https://www.stellarselect.co.uk
• HereFish: Recruitment Automation Software https://herefish.com

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In this week's episode of the Recruitment Reality Podcast, I had the pleasure of speaking with Sean Allen, a prominent figure in the talent acquisition community. Sean, who is currently the head of talent acquisition at The Very Group shared his extensive experience in tech recruitment and his role in fostering a vibrant talent community. Sean's journey in recruitment spans over 15 years, starting in agency work and transitioning to in-house roles across various companies. He's also a co-founder and community manager of The Talent Community, a platform for recruiters from all sectors to share knowledge and elevate the industry.

During our conversation, Sean discussed the challenges he faced when stepping into his first head of role at The Very Group particularly learning about new industries beyond tech. He emphasized the importance of employer branding, especially in tech and customer care, and how authenticity in telling a company's story can attract the right talent.

We delved into the impact of AI on recruitment, both from the perspective of improving internal processes and the potential concerns around candidates using AI to enhance their applications. Sean believes that AI should be seen as a tool to aid recruiters, not replace them, and that candidates using AI are simply demonstrating their resourcefulness.

Sean also shared insights on the evolution of the interview process, advocating for automation to streamline the candidate experience and allow recruiters to focus on more strategic, value-added activities.

To wrap up, Sean offered advice for both recruiters and candidates. For recruiters, especially those starting in a new company, he suggested looking for opportunities to automate and integrate processes to save time and improve the candidate experience. For candidates, he encouraged using AI as a smart tool for research but also advised going the extra mile to stand out.

Overall, my discussion with Sean Allen provided valuable insights into the dynamic world of talent acquisition and the role of technology in shaping its future.

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RESOURCES MENTIONED:

• Video Interview Screening Software https://www.willo.video
• Sean Allen, Head of Talent Acquisition at The Very Group https://www.linkedin.com/in/sean1allen
• Andrew Wood, COO & Co-founder at Willo https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-douglas-wood
• The Talent Community https://www.thetalentcommunity.net
• The Very Group https://www.theverygroup.com

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In this episode of The Recruitment Reality Podcast, I had the pleasure of talking with Harvey Bass from Stascom about how he has maintained his business over 30 years.

In this episode, we focus on how 'old school' methods are exactly what you need to keep your business alive.

Harvey talks about:

The importance of using the phone
How to remain persistent and polite
Why he has his team in the office
How Stascom has survived multiple recessions

You'd be a fool not to listen if you want to hear some advice from an expert in our industry.

Watch on YouTube

RESOURCES MENTIONED:

Companies

• Stascom - Leaders in Executive Recruitment Since 1987
• Willo.video - Video Interview Screening Software

People

• Harvey Bass, CEO & President at Stascom
• Andrew Wood, COO & Co-founder at Willo

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In this episode of The Recruitment Reality Podcast, I had the pleasure of talking with Justin Plagis from Packaly.  Join us as we discuss how Justin and his team have scaled their business across multiple cities and countries. Following their € 2.6 million seed funding, their team has expanded their last leg delivery service into more than 125 cities! Listen to this episode to hear exactly how they have done this whilst remaining lean. 

In this episode, we discuss: 

🔸 The importance of pace in the gig economy
🔸 How to build a simple, cost-effective and efficient tech stack
🔸 How to reduce onboarding time from 8 days to 7 hours! 

Follow us on Linkedin, Youtube and Spotify! 

Watch on YouTube

RESOURCES MENTIONED:

Companies

• Packaly - Power your business with Sustainable delivery

Tech Stack

• Willo.video - Video Interview Screening Software

People

• Justin Plagis, Product & Growth (Co-founder) at Packaly
• Andrew Wood, COO & Co-founder at Willo

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In this episode of The Recruitment Reality Podcast, I had the pleasure of talking with Mark Gibbons from Tunstall. Join us as we discuss how to recruit for secret but mission-led brands!

In this episode, we discuss:

🔸 Promoting a powerful business mission: Craft a compelling mission that attracts top talent and fosters engagement.

🔸 Managing candidate expectations: Learn effective techniques to foster positive candidate experiences and clear communication.

🔸 Using technology to automate tasks at scale: Discover innovative ways to streamline recruitment processes using automation and technology.

🔸 Finding meaning in your work: Gain insights into inspiring candidates by giving them meaning to their potential work.

Tune in now for valuable insights from Mark Gibbons and host [Your Name] on talent excellence in recruitment.

SecretBrands #TalentAcquisition #PodcastEpisode

Watch on YouTube

RESOURCES MENTIONED:

Companies

• Tunstall - Innovative Telehealth & Telecare Services
  • Job Openings

Tech Stack

• Willo.video - Video Interview Screening Software

People

• Mark Gibbons, Head of Talent at Tunstall
• Andrew Wood, COO & Co-founder at Willo

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In this episode of The Recruitment Reality Podcast, I had the pleasure of talking with Chandy Tucker... Here's a recap of the fantastic insights Chandy shared:

🌐 AI Empowering Recruiters: Discover how artificial intelligence is amplifying recruiter success and transforming the recruitment landscape.

💡 Problem First, Tech Solution Second: Understand the importance of identifying the core problem before developing a tech solution for your recruiting technology.

🚀 Simple Software, Superpowers Unleashed: Demystify the notion that complex tools are the only path to success. Learn how simple, user-friendly software can deliver recruiting superpowers.

Listen now to find out how Chandy has helped companies improve the efficiency of their recruitment funnel by implementing simple technology 🌟

AIinRecruiting #RectechSolutions #RecruitingSuperpowers

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RESOURCES MENTIONED:

Companies

• Chandy Tucker Consulting - Your one-stop shop, Human Resources, Recruiting, and Job Search support solution
• Blacksheep HR - Uniquely better job search and career coaching support

Tech Stack

• Willo.video - Video Interview Screening Software

People

• Chandy Tucker, Job Search Expert and HR Consultant at CTC & Blacksheep HR
• Andrew Wood, COO & Co-founder at Willo

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In this episode of The Recruitment Reality Podcast, I had the pleasure of hosting the amazing Sabrina Houssami, and it was an absolute game-changer! We dove deep into some crucial topics that every leader and aspiring leader should know about. Here's a recap of the fantastic insights Sabrina shared:

🔍 Vulnerability as a Leader: Sabrina emphasized the importance of vulnerability in driving diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives within an organization. She explained how being open and transparent about your own journey and experiences can create a safe space for employees to share their perspectives and foster a culture of trust.

🔍 Crafting Questions as a Candidate: Sabrina emphasized the importance of candidates asking thoughtful and strategic questions during job interviews. We explored the significance of candidates demonstrating their curiosity, preparedness, and genuine interest in the organization. Sabrina provided valuable guidance on how to craft questions that showcase your qualifications, align with your values, and help you evaluate if the company is the right fit for you.

💸 Tackling Pay Inequality: In the episode, we addressed the critical issue of pay inequality and discussed ways to address it within organizations. Sabrina shared her advice on how to establish transparent salary structures and foster a culture of fairness and equality.

🎧 Don't miss out on this empowering episode! Tune in to the podcast to hear Sabrina's expert advice, thought-provoking anecdotes, and actionable steps you can take to enhance DEI in your business.

I want to express my deepest gratitude to Sabrina Houssami for her invaluable contributions and for being such an inspiration to leaders everywhere. Her expertise in DEI, talent acquisition, and leadership development is truly remarkable.

💼 If you're passionate about creating a diverse, inclusive, and equitable workplace, this episode is a must-listen! Share your thoughts, insights, and any questions you may have in the comments below. Let's continue the conversation and work together towards building better organizations for everyone.

DEI #LeadershipMatters #InclusionMatters

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RESOURCES MENTIONED:

Companies

• Avanti Search - Boutique Recruitment Agency in Sydney, Australia

Tech Stack

• Willo.video - Video Interview Screening Software
• JobAdder - Applicant Tracking System and CRM Recruiting Software
• ZoomInfo TalentOS - Recruiting Database & Management System
• SEEK Talent Search - Australia's largest employment marketplace

People

• Sabrina Houssami, Founder & Recruitment Expert at Avanti Search
• Andrew Wood, COO & Co-founder at Willo

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In this episode of The Recruitment Reality Podcast, I had the pleasure of interviewing Kate Wright, Director of Talent Acquisition & Programs at WillowTree Apps. Kate shared with us her valuable insights and experience on how to hire talent for a fast-moving and ever-changing business like WillowTree Apps.

During our conversation, Kate explained how her team works closely with project planning to deliver future talent, and how their brand and culture shape the types of individuals that join their business. As a big company with an intimate feel, WillowTree Apps offers a unique work environment that attracts top talent.

We also discussed the latest technology that Kate has implemented to drive the success of her business, ensuring that all the technology they choose drives both efficiency and candidate experience. It is possible to create a dynamic and fast-paced environment while delivering top talent in the tech consultancy industry.

If you want to learn more about the secrets of recruiting in a dynamic and fast-paced environment, listen to the latest episode of The Recruitment Reality Podcast with Kate Wright. You won't want to miss it!

talentacquisition #recruiting #techconsultancy #podcast

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RESOURCES MENTIONED:

Companies

• WillowTree Apps - We design and build award-winning digital products. And we help shape the teams and process that drive them forward.

Tech Stack

• Willo.video - Video Interview Screening Software
• Greenhouse - Applicant tracking software & hiring platform
• Textio - Interrupt bias in performance feedback and recruiting

People

• Kate Wright, Director of Talent Acquisition & Programs at WillowTree Apps
• Andrew Wood, COO & Co-founder at Will t

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In this episode of The Recruitment Reality Podcast, I speak with Chase Kocher about the death of remote working in Austin.

Chase Kocher has years of experience in the Austin market. But it's all changing.

In this episode, you will hear:

1. How his team has seen a move away from resumes

2. Why remote working has become a perk

3. How the death of telephone interviews is affecting recruitment

Watch on YouTube

RESOURCES MENTIONED:

Companies

• Aim4Hire - Austin-based Recruiting Partner finding elite technical talent 4 elite tech startups.

Tech Stack

• Willo.video - Video Interview Screening Software

People

• Chase Kocher, CEO & Founder at Aim4Hire
• Andrew Wood, COO & Co-founder at Willo

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In this episode of The Recruitment Reality Podcast, I speak with Debbie Penn and Chris Havens about hiring at a huge scale across multiple state locations.

Debbie and Chris share their experience of running a huge-scale recruitment function with only 3 dedicated recruiters! This is something I've always been fascinated and surprised about. How do large, disparate organisations manage recruitment with only 3 people?

The answer, introduce a framework built on a culture that allows for individual adaptation! If that doesn't make sense, then this is a great episode to listen to. Debbie shares her years of experience within the Watermark Communities team, and how their CEO has managed to give freedom, whilst also creating a sense of belonging.

Listen to this episode to learn more about the importance of culture when building your recruitment function...

Watch on YouTube

RESOURCES MENTIONED:

Watermark Retirement Communities - Creating extraordinary and innovative communities where people thrive.

• Apply on Indeed.com

Tech Stack

• Symplr.com - Talent management software and solutions to hire, keep, and grow quality talent
• Willo.video - Video Interview Screening Software

People

• Debbie Penn, National Director of Recruitment at Watermark
• Chris Havens, Health Care Recruiter at Watermark
• Andrew Wood, COO & Co-founder at Willo

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In this episode of The Recruitment Reality Podcast, I speak with Mikey de Mello and Hamish Livingston about product development within the recruitment technology space.

This was a fascinating chat. Mikey, Product Manager at Florence, and Hamish, VP of Product at Willo®, are both experts at building disruptive rectech. They share their experience of building products that aim to challenge the market through innovative technology.

If you've ever wondered what it takes to build a rectech product, this could be a really interesting listen for you. Most people never speak to the person behind actually building out the tool they are using, so here is your opportunity!

We cover everything from problem-focused to development to managing client expectations and the future of rectech. It was a pleasure to chat with Mikey and Hamish.

Listen if you want to learn more about how the rectech tools you use are created.

Watch on YouTube

RESOURCES MENTIONED:

Tech Stack

• Florence.co.uk - Revolutionizing Social Care Staffing
• Willo.video - Video Interview Screening Software
• Hotjar.com - Website Heatmaps & Behavior Analytics Tools

People

• Mikey de Mello, Product Manager at Florence
• Hamish Livingston, Head of Product at Willo
• Andrew Wood, COO & Co-founder at Willo

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In this episode, I speak with Caitlin Ingham, Talent Acquisition Manager at Lunio about how to recruit post-Series A.

Caitlin jumped from agency to internal recruiting to follow the Lunio company mission. Her experience in building the post-series A business gives us invaluable insights. Caitlin talks us through how to stay true to your company culture while accelerating growth. From the tools that Caitlin uses to the way she engages critical stakeholders in the hiring process, there are many takeaways from this episode.

We also discuss how CVs for junior sales hires are meaningless. Instead, you should assess drive, communication, and personality, something we at Willo have long believed in!

Listen if you want to learn more about what it takes to build a team post a Series A investment...

Watch on YouTube

RESOURCES MENTIONED:

Tech Stack

• Lunio.ai - Remove bots, fake users & fake touchpoints from your entire performance marketing stack to win against the competition.
  • Careers at Lunio
• Willo.video - Video Interview Software
• Teamtailor - Recruitment & Employer Branding ATS

People

• Caitlin Lingham, Talent Acquisition Manager at Lunio
• Sam Madden, VP Global Sales at Lunio
• James Pritchard, Head of SDR at Lunio
• Alex, Segev, and Neil, Co-founders of Lunio
• Andrew Wood, COO & Co-founder at Willo

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In this episode, I speak with Robert Newry, CEO & Co-Founder of  Arctic Shores about how CVs really are rubbish, and this is why 👇

Robert Newry, joins me on The Recruitment Reality Podcast to talk about how we're both trying to kill the CV. A lofty ambition I know...

The episode is full of facts and stories that you'll love. For example, did you know there are 150 points of unconscious bias at play when you are reviewing a CV!

There is a reason why Arctic Shores have just closed £5.75 million Series B funding round. It's because whilst everyone knows CVs are 💩, there is still no universal alternative. Robert and his team are trying to change that.

Watch on YouTube

RESOURCES MENTIONED:Arctic Shores - Behaviour-Based Assessments, Powered By Science.
Connect with Robert on Linkedin
Willo.video - Video Interview Software 

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I invited candidates who are #OpenToWork on Linkedin to come on my podcast and share their personal experiences searching for a job and working with recruiters.

In this episode, I speak with Akosua Adjei Pokuaa, a self-motivated, responsible and passionate Talent Acquisition Partner/ DEI Enthusiast with 2 years of experience (Zalando and HelloFresh). She is currently seeking a Talent Acquisition role in Berlin.

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RESOURCES MENTIONED:

• Akosua's Linkedin
• Willo.video - Video Interview Software

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I invited candidates who are #OpenToWork on Linkedin to come on my podcast and share their personal experiences searching for a job and working with recruiters.

In this episode, I speak with Jonny Loudon, who has 14 years of experience serving in the military... and is now working to break into the tech startup world for a Senior Operations role.

Watch on YouTube

RESOURCES MENTIONED:

• Jonny Loudon's Linkedin
• Willo.video - Video Interview Software

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I invited candidates who are #OpenToWork on Linkedin to come on my podcast and share their personal experiences searching for a job and working with recruiters.

In this episode, I speak with Joshua Cohn, a candidate seeking a position as a Sales & Enablement Manager. He is a sales leader with a passion for coaching and developing others, especially consultative sales within innovative products. He has 8 years of client-facing experience (of which 4 years were at high-growth fintech startups including Acorns and Better)

Watch on YouTube

RESOURCES MENTIONED:

• Connect with Joshua Cohn
  • Linkedin
  • joshuatcohen@gmail.com
• Book Recommendation:
  • Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity
• Willo.video - Video Interview Software

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In this episode, I speak with Phil Strazzulla, founder of Select Software Reviews about how to build your HR Tech Stack. We discuss how to find the right technologies for your company, how video interviews have impacted the ecosystem and the benefits and risks of using artificial intelligence to source talent.

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RESOURCES MENTIONED:

• SelectSoftwareReviews.com - Your Guide to the Best HR and Recruiting Software
• Connect with Phil on Linkedin
• Willo.video - Video Interview Software

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In this episode, I speak with Shamir Gokani, a Lead of People and Growth at Teamed about what an employer of record is, how it can benefit your company, and what to consider before selecting one.

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RESOURCES MENTIONED:

• Learn more about Teamed
• Shamir's Linkedin

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In this episode, I speak with Luke Mellor, a Talent Acquisition Manager at Trainline about candidate experiences. 

Watch on YouTube

RESOURCES MENTIONED:

• Luke's Linkedin
• Careers at Trainline - Train & Bus Tickets Across Europe
• Willo.video - Video Interviewing Screening Software
• Applicant Tracking Systems:  Greenhouse.io, Lever.co, AshbyHQ.com
• Other mentions: Virgin Media Case Study, Depop, Glassdoor, Sonos, Uber, War Pigs by Black Sabbath, Karl Pilkington GIF

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In this episode, I speak with Amy Aberra, a Business Manager at Rise Resourcing, and the owner of Fashion Career Consultancy.

What does it take to make it into Drapers 30 under 30 list? 🤔

I'm honoured to speak with Amy Aberra for our round 2 discussions about careers in the fashion industry on this week's The Recruitment Reality Podcast. 🎙️

Amy's passion for the fashion industry is so infectious. She's not only helping find people jobs via Rise Resourcing, but she's also advising and coaching individuals looking to break into the space with her new(ish) venture Fashion Career Consultancy. 🧶

Listen or watch if you are interested to hear more about careers in the space, and how Amy is breaking down barriers to entry. 🎧

Watch on YouTube

RESOURCES:
Amy's Linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/in/amyaberra
Amy's Instagram https://www.instagram.com/fashioncareerconsultancy
Fashion Career Consultancy https://www.fashioncareerconsultancy.co.uk
Rise Resourcing https://riseresourcing.co.uk

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In this episode, I speak with Charlene Simpson, a Talent Acquisition Partner at Funding Circle about building equitable interview processes.

Watch on YouTube

RESOURCES:
Charlene Simpson https://www.linkedin.com/in/charlenesimpson
Funding Circle https://www.fundingcircle.com/uk
Milimo Banji https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WYuVioDNaC8

If you're worried that your interview process isn't delivering the diverse talent you want, this episode is a great place to start. Charlene has worked in an agency, in rectec, and now in-house for Funding Circle. Her insights are invaluable, as few have had the depth and breadth of exposure she has had over her career.

Listen to hear how you can build a more inclusive and equitable interview process...

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In this episode, I speak with two employees of Greenhouse about hiring strategies.

• Ariana Moon - Head of Talent Planning & Acquisition
• Scott Rappaport - Enterprise Customer Success

Resources

• Watch this episode on YouTube
• Listen to the Greenhouse podcast at greenhouse.io/podcast
• Learn more about Greenhouse Software at greenhouse.io

Willo has started to build a closer relationship with Greenhouse as we’ve seen how many of our clients are combining the power of asynchronous interviews with the full suite of benefits that’s Greenhouse offers.

In this episode, I’m talking with two Greenhouse team members about recruitment strategy and how companies can evolve their hiring mindset for the long-term. You'll hear insights into how Greenhouse, a company at the forefront of recruitment technology, is staying one step ahead of hiring trends as they enable their customers to achieve their business goals.

Ariana is the Sr. Director of People Planning & Acquisition at Greenhouse and partners with Greenhouse’s executive team to scale predictive hiring and people planning practices. She’s proud to lead a team that has helped Greenhouse 10x in headcount across multiple new geographies and is passionate about the impact of equitable and inclusive hiring. Prior to Greenhouse, Ariana has worked on people-focused teams in various industries, including non-profit, public relations and FinTech. Outside of work, she loves exploring intentional movement through yoga, salsa dancing and rock climbing, and ping pongs between two cities she calls home: New York and Las Vegas.

Scott Rappaport is a Customer Success Director on the Enterprise team at Greenhouse and has been working with Enterprise customers across numerous industries for over eight years. At Greenhouse he helps TA organizations effectively implement and utilize the Greenhouse platform to make more inclusive and educated hiring decisions. Outside of work, Scott enjoys traveling, watching (and playing) Soccer and spending time with his wife and two year old daughter.

Greenhouse is the hiring software company. We help businesses become great at hiring through our powerful hiring approach, complete suite of software and services, Hiring MaturityTM methodology and large partner ecosystem – so businesses can hire for what's next. Based in New York City with offices in San Francisco, Denver and Dublin, Greenhouse has over 700 employees around the world supporting more than 6,500 customers. Some of the smartest and most successful companies like HubSpot, Buzzfeed, J.D. Power, Booking.com, Scout24 and The Knot Worldwide use the Greenhouse hiring software platform to improve all aspects of hiring, helping them to attract top talent.

Listen to this episode if you want to get an insight into how global businesses are building their talent teams of the future and how they harness the power of technology to drive their decisions.

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I jokingly made a Linkedin post four days ago that has since gained 3.6 million impressions. With over 900 comments, many wanted to know the actual cost of a bad hire and how to calculate it. After my 15 minutes of fame on Linkedin (which my co-founder Euan Cameron will likely ridicule me for doing the rest of my life)... I thought it would be interesting to chat with Euan to discuss this question and share some tips on how you can best avoid making bad hires in the future.

Watch on YouTube Resources:

• Try Willo's Candidate Screening Software
• Euan's Blog Post: Six Exit Interview Questions That Are Actually Useful
• Andrew's Viral Linkedin Post With 3.6M Impressions
• Oxford Economics study mentioned in this episode

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In this episode, I speak to Rich Wilson, CEO & Co-Founder of Gigged.AI.

Rich and I have a shared history in high volume recruitment, both see the opportunity that technology offers to the mature market.

We discuss the freelance economy, the future of hiring for side hustlers and how individuals will be paid in the future - web 3, crypto and other subjects inclusive.

It's a fascinating talk about a business at the bleeding edge of rectech.

Listen if you want to learn more about the future of the freelance economy. 

Watch on YouTube

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In this episode, I speak with two members of Academy's Talent & People team:

• Max Pavier
• Lauren Greenaway

We talk about how Academy was born out of their own frustration with a lack of entry-level tech talent. Max was tasked with hiring high volumes of tech talent at the global e-commerce giants, THG and Very, and after battling over candidates for years, the idea for Academy was born.

Lauren, is the people and talent partner at Academy, having worked at Atos, Bloomberg and Morgan Stanley, she jumped into the startup world to support the Academy mission. 

Academy's mission is to improve diversity in techand to make skills ubiquitous within the industry. 

Listen to this episode if you want to learn more about how your company can source entry-level tech talent, without the headache of initial training. 

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In this episode, I speak with three members of HelloFresh's Talent Acquisition team:

• Marley Andrews - Talent Acquisition Manager
• Meg Jackson - Talent Acquisition Lead
• Jack Watson - Talent Acquisition Partner

We talk about how the HelloFresh culture is key to growing the business. Their authentic and honest appraisal of the business is truly inspiring. The team gives us insights on what it means to really hire at high volume, across a multisite organisation whilst also protecting their most important asset, the candidate experience.

We also touch on what they're doing to build more efficient process that both save time, but also improve the inclusivity and diversity of their workforce.

It really is a fascinating chat, and we had a good laugh along the way too.

Listen to this episode if your want to learn more about how company culture and a real desire to support people from all backgrounds can help you scale a company at an astonishing rate.

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In this episode, I speak to Denise Kirkham, Founding Partner of Distinctive People.

Ever wondered if one way video interviews really works for board level roles? 🤔

Well, Denise Kirkham from Distinctive People HR & OD Ltd, has been using Willo to recruit top-level talent into charity and non-profit organisations since 2019.

Denise also talks about the challenges associated with hiring in this sector. Consulting with clients, understanding candidate motivations, and how to manage expectations.

This episode of The Recruitment Reality Podcast is well worth a listen if you are debating how to use new technology with experienced candidates.

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In this episode, I speak to Michelle Theuma, Managing Director of Onyx Recruitment.

Michelle's focus is within the financial services industry. Michelle's experience spans across the last 17 years in recruitment, and having been made redundant in the pandemic, Michelle made the bold move to actually buy the business off her old boss!

We explore the unique candidate journey within financial services, identifying and attracting passive candidates, and how recruiters can use data to effectively build trust with candidates and clients alike.

If you want to build a recruitment agency that works 95% on a retained basis, then this is a great episode to listen to. 

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In this episode, I speak to Paul Breloff, CEO & Co-Founder of Shortlist

Paul's background in was in financial inclusion, investing in fintech start-ups in Africa and India. Paul realised that the biggest challenge all these companies faced was finding the talent they needed.

Shortlist was actually born as an HR Tech business, focusing on assessing talent through technology.  The business pivoted into providing recruitment services after seeing the opportunity in the Sub Sahara African market.

Based in Nairobi, Paul and his team are now building a fascinating business. Their aim is to tap into the availability of entry level talent in this market. Up to 40% of the under 30 population in this market are unemployed. This means there is a huge volume of applicants, in a demographic that countries like the US and UK lack due to our aging populations.

Listen if you want to learn more about how to tap into a market of talent that you probably haven't considered in the past.

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In this episode, I speak to Alex Walker, Head of Talent Acquistion at SaaSleads.

Alex has had a fascinating career in recruitment that has taken her around the world, predominantly working for Reed before moving into the start-up world. Her experience has been across every type of role, from entry level to executive headhunting.

Listen if you want to learn more about how Alex and her team are promoting diversity for entry-level sales hires, an industry that has traditionally struggled to be inclusive.

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In this episode, I speak to Alex Shapland Howes, CEO and Co-founder of RideTandem. 

Inspired by a group of dads in Rochdale, unable to get a job because they didn't have access to transport, Alex decided to build RideTandem.  

Why does transport poverty have anything to do with recruitment? Well, have you struggled to hire for your warehouse or depot based on the M62...? Transport poverty is the reason why. They weren't built with talent mobility in mind, goods mobility! 

The team at RideTandem have developed an amazing business.

They help people get jobs and stop businesses from losing 10's of thousands of pounds in downtime. 

If you are struggling to find this type of talent, you have to listen to this podcast. 

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In this episode, I speak to Pres Jeyadeva. Pres has been responsible for taking TeamTailor from a complete unknown to one of the most recognizable brands in the UK HR Tech market.

We talk about everything from company catfish culture, the state of HR Tech in the UK and the challenges of hiring. Pres has not only helped others grow, he's also had to recruit in one of the trickiest markets for SaaS salespeople.

Listen to hear more about how TeamTailor helps showcase your real culture and 

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In this episode, I speak to Myriah Moorhead-Kegel. A retail veteran, Myriah spent many years in HR and recruiting at Nordstrom before making a leap of faith into the burgeoning industry of Cannabis! 

Involved from the very start of building their recruitment function, hear how Myriah and her team have developed a process that attracts talent that others don't.  They have increased the volume of hiring from 80 to nearly 300 a month in their team alone. 

We discuss the challenges of building a team rapidly, in both a new industry and a new company. 

Listen to hear more about how you can build a team and process that can deliver when you have a small recruitment team. 

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In this episode, I speak to Joel Mtebe, an undergraduate from UCLAN, currently on his year in industry with Network rail. We discuss what it's like to interview as an individual with ASD, how his experience shaped his perception of brands, and what his current employer is doing well to support him.

You won't have heard of Joel, but he's an inspiring young man, and I loved getting to know him better. 

Joel taught himself programming, is volunteering with a great charity to inspire others, and was the only applicant in the country to secure a year in industry as a developer at Network rail. 

Listen to hear more about how your recruitment experience is being perceived by candidates from a neurodiverse background. 

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In this episode, I speak to Adam Gordon, Co-founder of Candidate.ID, now part of the ICIMS family. We discuss sourcing and employer branding, advising how talent professionals can find hidden talent, control the narrative of their brand and ultimately find more candidates in a difficult market. We also discuss the importance of reviewing your technology stack. 

I was unaware of this, but at the time of the interview, Adam was finalising the sale of his company to ICIMS, so I’m extremely grateful for his time. 

Listen to hear more about how you can find hidden talent and build an attractive employer brand. 

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In this episode, I speak to Mark Rothwell (SVP at Pareto) about his 15 years of experience hiring graduates across the UK. We discuss the merits of virtual assessment days, changing attitudes in sales recruitment, and the future of how technology will impact our industry. 

Listen to hear more about how the UK's largest graduate recruitment organisation evolved over the last 2 years. 

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In this episode, I speak to Nerida Rooney about her vast experience in the world of recruitment. She has excellent insight, working initially within Charities, then Carlsberg, and now finding herself heading up talent and diversity at Kier. 

We explore untapped talent pools and what initiatives Kier has implemented to drive diversity.

Listen to hear more about how you change the perception of your business.

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In this episode, I speak to Holly Allen about her experience finding a new role in today's talent driven market. We explore how she identified the companies she wanted to speak to, their interview process, and ultimately why she chose her new employer. Holly also ends the episode with some top tips for candidates looking for a new role! 

Listen to hear a candidate's perspective on how to win the battle for top talent.