After more than 20 years in recruitment, I have probably read more CVs than I care to admit.
And one thing that experience has taught me is that the person who looks best on paper isn’t always the person who turns out to be best for the job.
A CV gives you a useful snapshot of someone’s career. You can see where they’ve worked, what they’ve done and how their experience has developed. But it doesn’t always tell you how that experience might translate to a particular business, team or situation.
I partnered with a senior HR candidate who had moved out of HR and into a commercial role. 18 months later, they were looking to bring that commercial experience back into their next HR leadership role. On paper, it could look like a detour. In reality, they had gained a much stronger understanding of the commercial side of the business and were bringing a different perspective back into HR. If you didn’t know the person or understand the context, you could easily miss that.
That’s where knowing a market and the people within it becomes valuable.
When you’ve been having conversations with the same people over many years, you see their careers develop. You understand the different routes people have taken and the experiences they’ve picked up along the way, including the things that don’t necessarily translate neatly into a job title or CV. It changes how you look at a brief.
You might see a role and think of someone who wouldn’t necessarily appear in a straightforward keyword search, but whose experience could actually be a very strong fit.
At the same time, recruitment is becoming much more automated. AI can search huge numbers of profiles, identify patterns and match experience to a job description in seconds. There’s a lot that’s useful about that, and it will undoubtedly change how we work.
But finding someone who matches a brief isn’t quite the same as understanding whether they’re right for it. The more sophisticated the technology becomes, the more important the context around someone’s career may become – the decisions they’ve made, the environments they’ve worked in and what they’ve learned along the way.
Because sometimes the best person for a role isn’t the most obvious match on paper. They’re the person whose experience makes more sense once you know the story behind it.