Looks Good on Paper

Quality of hire, AI in recruiting, and hiring beyond the CV, with Gong’s Robert Liedtka.

Most talent teams still report on how fast they hired, and almost none can say how good the hires turned out to be. Robert Liedtka, Senior Director of Talent Operations and AI Strategy at Gong, has spent his career on both the delivery and operations sides of talent acquisition, at Google, Meta and MongoDB, and he is blunt about it: shaving 10% off time to fill is worthless if the person leaves in a year.

Anita and Robert get into ho...

Hiring podcast for people leaders: Natasha Lakhani, SVP People and Talent at Super.com, on defining the role, hiring for judgment, and fair assessment.

Natasha Lakhani’s profile reads as a clean line: Wattpad, Dyson, more than seven years at Weight Watchers Canada, and now Super.com. In this episode of Looks Good on Paper she tells the story the profile leaves out. She started in finance at Bose, did an MBA at Queen’s, and was told by a coach that she was a jack of all trades, master of nothing. That feedback pushed her to go d...

Structured interviews, coherence bias and hiring beyond the CV.

Most hiring processes are built to find people who interview well. Chrissy Oni, Talent Acquisition Director, Europe at Stagwell Global, has spent her career learning that this is not the same as finding people who will do the job well. She started as an estate agent, moved into agency recruitment, and went on to operations leadership at Assembly Global before taking on talent strategy and hiring across Stagwell’s media, commerce and communications brands in Europe.

In this episode, Chrissy explains why so many mishires trace ba...

Interviewer training, culture fit bias and hiring without a CV, with Jay Guney, founder and managing director of Dcoded.

Most hiring processes put real effort into finding candidates and almost none into the person who interviews them. Jay Guney sees the result from the agency side every week. Many of the hiring managers his candidates meet have never had formal interview training. They are handed a candidate and asked to see if they're good, whatever that means for the role, and some walk out saying "thank God that's over, they seem like they can do the job."...

Military hiring, alternative talent pipelines and candidate-led recruitment, with Daniel Hackett of Amazon.

Most hiring starts with the business. What does the team need, what skills are on the job description, what does the ideal candidate look like. Daniel Hackett thinks that is the biggest mistake companies keep making. As a military recruiter leading military and police hiring across Europe for Amazon, he works the other way round. His team talks to service leavers, veterans, reservists and military spouses first, finds out what they are good at and what they enjoy, and then finds the role in...

Skills-based hiring, ageism, and what the research says about years of experience, with Heidi Wassini, Chief People Officer at Viebke & West.

Most hiring processes begin by screening on years of experience, and the evidence for that practice is close to nonexistent. A 2019 meta-analysis of more than 80 studies found the corrected correlation between prehire work experience and job performance is 0.06, which is where Heidi Wassini's comparison to horoscopes comes from, and she makes it without much patience for the alternative. She has removed the CV from hiring processes since 2012, long before unbiased recruitment became a topic in Denmark...

Hiring bias, AI screening and skills-based hiring at global scale, with Kanwar Kohli, Senior Leader for Global Talent Delivery at Booking.com.

Most organisations respond to hiring risk the same way. They add a stage. Then an interviewer. Then a wider debrief. Kanwar Kohli's argument is that this does not raise decision quality, it lowers it, because you keep adding assessors from the same craft who look for the same things, and because a panel assembled to spread risk also spreads ownership until nobody is accountable for the call. What it produces is decision paralysis while everyone...

Workforce planning, hiring capacity and the end of the CV, with Leo Harrison, founder and CEO of Chapter 2.

Most hiring plans are modelled around the talent team. The funnel gets loaded, capacity gets mapped, monthly targets get set, and the plan looks completely achievable. Leo Harrison's view is that this is where recruitment quietly breaks, because a talent partner only runs one or two stages of an interview process and nobody checks whether the hiring managers, department leads and executives sitting in every other stage have the hours. Before he assesses any workforce plan he asks leaders...

Most hiring teams have an audit for bias. They check the language in the job ad, they structure the interview, they train the panel. Almost none of them audit the requirements themselves. Cary Sparrow thinks that is where the real damage is being done.

Cary is the Founder and CEO of WageScape, a platform tracking global hiring activity, pay movement, and talent supply and demand in real time. Before that he spent 35 years across engineering, the US Navy, global consulting, and corporate HR leadership. The through line, in his words, is looking for the things other people...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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"...

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...

"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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 deca...

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 bigg...

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 me...

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...

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 o...

Shanal Kazi breaks down why so many hiring decisions still optimize for comfort over capability — and what changes when you stop treating the CV as your strongest signal. We cover the hidden bias against non-linear careers, and what “better signal” could look like in 2026.

What you will learn:

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...

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 talk...

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.

...

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...

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 lett...

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 t...

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 Cl...

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 mo...

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...