Looks Good on Paper

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...

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 companie...

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...

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 R...

"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 w...

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 t...

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 wor...

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 t...

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 th...

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 th...

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 Suth...

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 tr...

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 worke...

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'...

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 competitiv...

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 t...

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 generalist...

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...

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 befor...

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 be...

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 like...

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...

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...

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 wh...

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...