Over the years, I’ve hired a lot of people.
As a founder, an executive, and a hiring manager, I’ve read hundreds of CVs. And gradually, something became clear to me: while CVs are familiar and convenient, they rarely help me decide who the right person is.
Not because skills and experience don’t matter, they do. But because being able to do the work is only part of the equation.
When I’m hiring, I’m trying to understand something more fundamental: can we work well together?
The questions that really matter
Successful hires rarely succeed or fail because of a missing skill.
They succeed or fail because of how someone:
- approaches problems when things aren’t clear
- thinks under uncertainty
- communicates and collaborates
- responds to feedback and challenge
- is motivated by the work and the environment
These are the things that shape day-to-day working relationships. They’re also the things that are hardest to infer from a document.
What CVs are good at (and where they struggle)
CVs are not useless.
They can be a helpful historical snapshot, a summary of where someone has been and the roles they’ve held. In some contexts, that information still matters.
But CVs are far less effective at showing how someone works.
They tend to:
- focus on responsibilities rather than outcomes
- reward tidy, linear career paths
- under-represent context, judgement, and collaboration
- quietly penalise anything unconventional
And real careers are rarely tidy.
Some of the most effective people I’ve worked with have taken winding paths. They’ve changed direction, built things alongside their main roles, stepped away, come back stronger, or combined multiple ways of working over time.
That richness rarely fits neatly into a two-page document.
Hiring is contextual, not generic
When hiring works well, it’s usually because there’s clarity about:
- the problems that need solving
- the outcomes that matter
- the environment someone will be working in
Good hiring is about fit in context, not abstract suitability.
Once a potential alignment is visible, spending weeks filtering people at arm’s length or decoding documents becomes less helpful. What matters most is getting into a conversation early.
Why conversation changes everything
It’s through conversation that you begin to understand whether someone:
- listens as well as they speak
- thinks clearly when challenged
- engages constructively with uncertainty
- brings energy to a team, or drains it
These signals are subtle, but they’re powerful. And they’re difficult to extract from static summaries.
Conversation doesn’t replace experience or capability, but it does reveal how those things show up in practice.
So, is the CV still fit for purpose?
Perhaps, in a limited sense.
As a summary. As a starting point. As one signal among many.
But if hiring success increasingly depends on collaboration, judgement, trust, and shared understanding, then it’s worth asking whether we’re leaning too heavily on tools that were designed for a very different world of work.
Work has changed. How we recognise potential hasn’t always kept up.
An open question
If hiring decisions hinge on how people think, communicate, and contribute, what signals should we be paying more attention to?
That’s one of the questions we’re actively exploring as Matchez takes shape.
If you are curious about a better way of doing recruitment, then why not join Matchez and get involved.