Episodes

  • Hiring for judgment, not unicorns, with Natasha Lakhani of Super.com

    Hiring for judgment, not unicorns, with Natasha Lakhani of Super.com
    Nov 4 2026

    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 deep, and she moved between companies because the mission and the challenge mattered to her.

    She also explains why companies keep making the same hiring mistake. They go looking for a unicorn without deciding what they need. For Natasha, the competencies that matter most are critical thinking and judgment, and judgment is what AI can’t take away. Her fix is to talk to the stakeholders the hire will serve before you write the job description.

    Then the three rapid-fire questions. On hidden bias, she explains the difference between “moving fast” and “moving fast with intention.” On removing the CV, she says you’d need a strong rubric and you’d ask candidates to show their work in the AI tool of their choice. She closes with the thing that will never show up on her CV: she’s a mom of four.

    What you’ll learn
    → Why a non-linear career is a strength
    → How to define a role before you hire
    → Why judgment and critical thinking beat a long requirements list
    → How rubrics and “show me” assessments make hiring fairer
    → How Super.com is building an AI fluency model

    Looks Good on Paper is hosted by Anita Chauhan and powered by Willo. Season 4 is about people being more than a CV: everything the document leaves out, on both sides of the hiring table.

    Chapters
    00:00 Intro
    01:06 The path her CV doesn’t show
    06:02 Q1: The hiring mistake companies keep making
    09:48 Q2: The hidden bias in progressive hiring
    12:58 Q3: What if CVs disappeared tomorrow?
    16:21 Building an AI fluency model at Super.com
    18:20 Wildcard: what wouldn’t show up on a CV
    19:39 Wrap

    GUEST
    Natasha Lakhani: https://www.linkedin.com/in/natashalakhani/

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

    LISTEN AND FOLLOW
    YouTube: https://youtu.be/yZSpz7X4puw
    Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/looks-good-on-paper/id1625835562
    Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0dbfz6y0tMq3crViHQD66H
    All episodes: looksgoodonpaper.willo.video

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

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

    Enjoyed this one? Share it with someone who hires, and follow the show so you never miss an episode.

    Looks Good on Paper is a hiring podcast from Willo. In this episode, Natasha Lakhani, SVP People and Talent at Super.com, covers how to define a role before you hire, why judgment and critical thinking matter more than a unicorn CV, how structured rubrics make hiring fairer, and how Super.com is building an AI fluency model.

    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
    Show More Show Less
    19 mins
  • Coherence bias and the four-question screening call, with Chrissy Oni of Stagwell Global

    Coherence bias and the four-question screening call, with Chrissy Oni of Stagwell Global
    Oct 14 2026

    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 back to the interview itself. Companies invest in the process and in who the candidate meets, but rarely design the conversation to test for what the role will actually demand. Three months later, the feedback is always the same: they were great in the interview.

    Her fix starts well before anyone sits down with a candidate. Chrissy won’t work on a role until the hiring manager has given her a proper brief, and she coaches interviewers on what to ask, what not to ask, and how to score against an objective scale rather than a gut feeling about whether they’d enjoy a drink with someone.

    She also unpacks coherence bias: the tendency to trust candidates who speak smoothly and confidently, and to stop probing once an early impression is confirmed. Quieter candidates lose out, even when their skills are a better fit.

    Finally, Chrissy shares the four questions she asks in every screening call, why she treats the CV as a reference point, and how she turns the answers into a summary that gets hiring managers genuinely engaged before the interview.

    What you’ll learn
    → Why great interviews so often lead to mishires
    → How a proper hiring manager brief changes the whole process
    → What coherence bias is and how to interrupt it
    → The four-question screening structure Chrissy uses every time
    → How to write candidate summaries hiring managers actually read

    Looks Good on Paper is hosted by Anita Chauhan and powered by Willo. Season 4 is about people being more than a CV: everything the document leaves out, on both sides of the hiring table.

    GUEST
    Chrissy Oni: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrissyoni/

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

    LISTEN AND FOLLOW
    YouTube: https://youtu.be/a-nT-e0oQPk
    Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/looks-good-on-paper/id1625835562
    Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0dbfz6y0tMq3crViHQD66H
    All episodes: looksgoodonpaper.willo.video

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

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

    If you enjoyed this episode, share it with someone who hires and follow the show for new conversations.

    In this episode of Looks Good on Paper, Chrissy Oni of Stagwell Global explains why candidates who interview well can still be mishires, how coherence bias favours confident communicators, and the structured four-question screening call she uses to assess talent beyond the CV.

    Episode Summary: Chrissy Oni of Stagwell Global on why great interviews make bad hires, coherence bias, and the four questions she asks in every screening call.

    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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    17 mins
  • Untrained Interviewers and the Culture Fit Myth, with Jay Guney

    Untrained Interviewers and the Culture Fit Myth, with Jay Guney
    Oct 7 2026
    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." Sometimes it works out. It is rarely predictable, and candidates who gave up 30, 60 or 90 minutes often get no useful feedback in return.Jay has spent 13 years in UK recruitment. He founded Dcoded in May 2024 as a recruitment partner working exclusively in AI, data and engineering, building talent pools from chief data and AI leaders to ML engineers and data governance experts for SaaS, retail and consultancy businesses. Dcoded went for B Corp accreditation from day one, because Jay wanted to build an agency that challenges the stigma recruiters often carry.In this episode Jay unpacks the hidden bias inside "culture fit." Every client tells him candidates must fit the culture, yet three people in the same room will describe that culture three different ways, and without a definition it often slides into whether the hiring manager would enjoy a drink with the candidate on a Friday. He also explains why companies that ask candidates for their opinions often reject the ones who disagree, and why his own personality test results changed depending on whether he'd made a placement that day.On CVs, Jay describes placements where the client only ever saw a limited company name and a contract, and others made through blind candidate packs built from answers to questions agreed with the client in advance. As far as he knows, those hires are still in role. For his wildcard, he describes the AI tool he would give every hiring manager: one that plays two candidates, one you should hire and one you shouldn't, so interviewers can practise before they meet real people.What you'll learn → Why interviewer training is the most overlooked part of hiring → Why candidates deserve feedback after giving up their time → What "culture fit" really means, and how to stop it hiding bias → Why personality tests can mislead hiring decisions → How blind candidate packs can replace the CV → How AI could train hiring managers to interview betterLooks Good on Paper is hosted by Anita Chauhan and powered by Willo. Season 4 is about everything the document leaves out, on both sides of the hiring table.GUESTJay Guney, Founder and Managing Director, DcodedLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jayguney/ YOUR HOSTAnita Chauhan, Founder, InGoodCo.LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anitachauhan/LISTEN AND FOLLOWYouTube: https://youtu.be/w3L3LuFjasEApple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/looks-good-on-paper/id1625835562 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0dbfz6y0tMq3crViHQD66H All episodes: looksgoodonpaper.willo.videoPOWERED BY WILLOhttps://www.willo.video/looks-good-on-paperCONNECT WITH USLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/10170893If this one hit home for someone on your hiring team, send it to them. Follow Looks Good on Paper wherever you listen so you get every Season 4 conversation.Looks Good on Paper is a podcast about hiring, hosted by Anita Chauhan and powered by Willo. In this episode, Jay Guney, founder and managing director of the AI, data and engineering recruitment partner Dcoded, explains why untrained interviewers are the biggest mistake in hiring, why "culture fit" hides bias when nobody defines it, and how blind candidate packs have led to placements without a CV. Season 4 asks what a CV leaves out, on both sides of the hiring table.Show ResourcesWillo: willo.video - The most cost-effective way to screen candidates at scale. Interview candidates anywhere & at any timeCV Free Toolkit: cvfree.me/join - Break up with the CV and get everything you need to modernize your hiring approach with skills-based assessmentsAnita Chauhan: linkedin.com/in/anitachauhan - Connect with the host
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    21 mins
  • Hiring for potential, not perfection, with Daniel Hackett of Amazon

    Hiring for potential, not perfection, with Daniel Hackett of Amazon
    Sep 23 2026

    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 Amazon that fits. He describes the team as an internal agency whose real priority is the candidate, and he argues that what a hiring team says it wants is often not what it needs.

    That approach has a commercial logic he makes plainly. When a recruiter has spent hours with a candidate rather than ten minutes, the hiring team doesn't need ten rounds of interviews. It sees one or two prepared candidates, and one of them is likely to get the job, instead of the business spending hundreds of hours interviewing to hire one person. And the time invested in candidates who don't get the role is rarely wasted. Daniel has seen candidates come back six, twelve or eighteen months later and be hired.

    The hidden bias he names is against alternative backgrounds: military, police, fire and rescue, prison services, healthcare, former professional athletes. Hiring managers look at an infantry officer and struggle to picture them in operations, when planning, process, giving and receiving orders and leading people are their bread and butter. His instruction to hiring managers is to look for potential rather than perfection, because nobody arrives as a perfect Amazon candidate. The company-specific knowledge can be taught in the first six months. He also describes military spouses as one of the hardest pipelines, since they move every three to four years, and explains how Amazon can relocate them internally or make their role virtual.

    Asked what hiring without CVs would look like, he answers in one word: nirvana. Many of his candidates haven't interviewed in more than 30 years and have never needed to write a CV, which he says is not their fault. As a dyslexic thinker, he knows the problem personally. He can talk through his experience in an interview, but getting a great CV out of his head and onto paper is where he gets stuck, and a screening process that filters on that is not inclusive.

    For teams that feel they have exhausted their talent pool, his advice is practical. Go to the events where these communities are, message people on LinkedIn, and have twenty-minute conversations with someone in the fire service or the NHS even when you are not hiring. Amazon doesn't own this gold mine, he says. Anyone can open it.

    Looks Good on Paper is hosted by Anita Chauhan and powered by Willo. Season 4 is about everything the document leaves out, on both sides of the hiring table.

    Guest: Daniel Hackett, Military Recruiter, Amazon
    Host: Anita Chauhan, Founder, InGoodCo.
    Willo: https://www.willo.video/looks-good-on-paper

    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
    Show More Show Less
    22 mins
  • Why years of experience predicts almost nothing, with Heidi Wassini of Viebke & West

    Why years of experience predicts almost nothing, with Heidi Wassini of Viebke & West
    Sep 16 2026
    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, and she is quietly amused that people have since been invited onto national television to talk about doing the same thing.Heidi came into talent acquisition from telco product management, which means she arrived thinking commercially about hiring before that was fashionable, and her working rule is that if she is not helping managers make money or save money she should not be in the room. She has led global talent acquisition and employer branding at Too Good To Go and Vivino, spent a decade at Ramboll, and runs Heartfelt.biz alongside her in-house role. She is an RL100 member, a Noon AI Talent 100 honouree, and is quoted in both of Katrina Collier's books.The bias she names is one very few people would guess at. We ask candidates to demonstrate motivation, in written applications and again in interviews, on the assumption that we can read it. A 2021 study from Utrecht University tested that assumption by comparing recruiter judgements of candidate motivation against candidates' own self-reported motivation and against an algorithmic assessment. The algorithm was the more accurate of the two, and the recruiters were not merely imprecise, their reads ran in the wrong direction, so candidates who were motivated were judged not to be and candidates who were not were judged to be. What recruiters were actually responding to was tone of voice, facial expression and other behavioural signals they trusted far more than the evidence supports. Heidi pairs this with the observation that the overwhelming majority of chief executives describe their decisions as intuition-led, and lets the listener draw the obvious conclusion about what that means at the top of an organisation.Her alternative is not theoretical. Hiring a recruiter onto her own team, she asked candidates to answer case-based questions with no names attached, then ran structured competency-based interviews through an avatar system that scored the answers alongside her own scoring. Five finalists came out of it and not one of them would have survived a CV screen. Three came from communications backgrounds with no recruitment experience, one from a public sector role she had privately written off as untransferable to tech, and one was a woman who had recruited in India and Canada and then spent three years in Denmark unable to get a job at all. Heidi hired two of them. The second is the best hire she has ever made, and on her first day, before formally starting, she sourced two candidates in three hours for a technical engineering role the team had failed to fill in six weeks. One of them was hired.The episode closes on something Heidi had not planned to say. She is 54. At fifty, her applications stopped converting entirely, including the referred ones, which she describes as a common experience among women in her network. So she took ten years of pre-HR experience off her CV, removed the dates from her education, added the ages of her twins, and the interviews resumed. When her real age surfaced in those interviews, the word that kept appearing was young. Young team, young energy. She builds her own GPTs, has a job-ad writing tool she developed herself, and tracks the frontier of talent technology more closely than most people half her age. Her closing line is the argument in miniature: you can be a very old thirty year old, and you can be a very young fifty year old.Looks Good on Paper is hosted by Anita Chauhan and powered by Willo. Season 4 is about everything the document leaves out, on both sides of the hiring table.Guest: Heidi Wassini, Chief People Officer, Viebke & West Host: Anita Chauhan, Founder, InGoodCo. Willo: https://www.willo.video/looks-good-on-paperShow ResourcesWillo: willo.video - The most cost-effective way to screen candidates at scale. Interview candidates anywhere & at any timeCV Free Toolkit: cvfree.me/join - Break up with the CV and get everything you need to modernize your hiring approach with skills-based assessmentsAnita Chauhan: linkedin.com/in/anitachauhan - Connect with the host
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    22 mins
  • Why more interviews mean worse hires, with Kanwar Kohli of Booking.com

    Why more interviews mean worse hires, with Kanwar Kohli of Booking.com
    Sep 9 2026
    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 waits for consensus. His framing of the underlying problem is that companies are afraid of making the wrong decision rather than trying to make the right one, and that the gain sits in assessing differently rather than assessing more.Kanwar has spent five years at Booking.com building and scaling talent functions across tech, product, commercial and early careers. Before that he ran RPO programmes at Korn Ferry and established Allegis Global Solutions' first EMEA delivery centre, having led talent teams in digital marketing and ad operations. He is an RL100 member and one of this year's Talent 100.On bias, he makes a specific claim. Educational pedigree has lost some of its grip on hiring, but organisational pedigree replaced it. That candidate came from Amazon, get them in. That one came from Meta, definitely get them in. The why rarely follows. He sees this most acutely in scale-ups, where the logic is aspirational, and where hiring people fluent in enterprise guardrails often works against an environment that needs everyone to roll their sleeves up. His challenge to hiring managers is to ask what about that organisation does not fit how we work, and then to assess for adaptability rather than admire the logo. He also says plainly that he has not yet seen any organisation do skills-based hiring properly at scale, which he treats as a reason to experiment in segments rather than a reason to stop.On removing the CV, he is more careful than most guests on this show. There has to be an entry point, something that separates you from the other five hundred applicants. But the CV is context dependent and companies apply it as though it is universal. His method is to look at historic hiring data, find the people still performing five years after they were hired, and work backwards to what the process actually selected for. Booking.com hires around one hundred software engineering graduates a year, and self-taught candidates are holding the same bar or better than people who spent four years studying it. That is a signal the CV did not give. So you remove the CV for that segment, not across the board, and you A/B test it, because experimentation is the only way any process innovates.He also describes the loop now shaping candidate behaviour at volume. Candidates use AI to articulate their experience, which he considers a completely valid use case and which Booking.com has written guidelines around. Application rates climb. Employers reach for AI to assess the volume. AI is assessing AI, and the open question is what counts as a real signal on either side. Alongside that, he sees skills becoming far more transferable, with people moving from UX research and academic research into machine learning and data science as they try to future-proof their own careers.Looks Good on Paper is hosted by Anita Chauhan and powered by Willo. Season 4 is about everything the document leaves out, on both sides of the hiring table.Guest: Kanwar Kohli, Senior Leader, Global Talent Delivery at Booking.comHost: Anita Chauhan, Founder, InGoodCo.Watch: https://youtu.be/vK8maWDefNAGUESTKanwar Kohli, Senior Leader, Global Talent Delivery at Booking.comLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kanwarkohli/OUR HOSTAnita Chauhan, Founder, InGoodCo., Brand and Thoughtleadership @WilloLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anitachauhan/LISTEN AND FOLLOWYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@looksgoodonpaperpodcastAll episodes: looksgoodonpaper.willo.videoPOWERED BY WILLOwww.willo.videoCONNECT WITH USLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/willovideoIf this one landed with someone on your hiring team, send it to them. Follow Looks Good on Paper wherever you listen so you get every Season 4 conversation.Looks Good on Paper is a podcast about hiring, hosted by Anita Chauhan and powered by Willo. In this episode, Leo Harrison, founder and CEO of the embedded talent business Chapter 2, explains why most workforce plans fail on interview capacity rather than candidate supply, why cultural alignment is the bias that survives in companies who believe they have addressed bias, and what he thinks replaces the CV. Season 4 asks what a CV leaves out, on both sides of the hiring table.#hiring #talentacquisition #recruitmentShow ResourcesWillo: willo.video - The most cost-effective way to screen candidates at scale. Interview candidates anywhere & at any timeCV Free Toolkit: ...
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    19 mins
  • Why hiring plans fail, with Leo Harrison of Chapter 2

    Why hiring plans fail, with Leo Harrison of Chapter 2
    Sep 2 2026

    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 a single question: has your team got 50 hours spare to do interviews? The answer is almost always no.

    Leo spent more than 15 years at Oliver as global COO, helping scale the agency from four people to thousands of people across 40 countries. Recruitment was the hardest and most expensive problem the business had, so he left to solve it. Chapter 2, the embedded talent business he founded, now hires across six countries for brands including Unilever, KPMG, Wayfair and Bumble, and has appeared on the Sunday Times Fast Track 100 three years running. Chapter 2 also works inside Stephen Bartlett's ecosystem, using The Culture Test with clients.

    In this episode Leo covers the capacity problem and how to fix it without new technology, why the talent team should be working inside the hiring manager's own network rather than beside it, and the bias he thinks progressive companies still miss. Technical hiring assesses capability relentlessly, he argues, and assesses cultural alignment almost never, which is how teams end up with people who can do the work and damage the output of everyone around them. He is also unusually honest about his own bias, describing himself as bad at recruitment because he hires people he likes, and explaining the advice a former boss gave him about hiring someone he did not naturally get on with.

    On CVs, Leo is blunt. He thinks they should have disappeared years ago. He asks for a LinkedIn profile instead, then goes straight past the profile to what the person engages with, comments on and reacts to, because that tells him more than any employment history. He also describes the product Chapter 2 is building to pull candidate profiles from more than 60 sources without relying on LinkedIn at all, on the argument that the strongest engineers have neither a polished profile nor a CV.

    Looks Good on Paper is hosted by Anita Chauhan and powered by Willo. Season 4 is about everything the document leaves out, on both sides of the hiring table.

    GUEST
    Leo Harrison, Founder and CEO, Chapter 2
    LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/leoharrison1/
    Chapter 2: https://www.chapter2.group/meet-chapter-2

    YOUR HOST
    Anita Chauhan, Founder, InGoodCo., Brand and Thoughtleadership @Willo
    LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anitachauhan/

    LISTEN AND FOLLOW
    YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@looksgoodonpaperpodcast
    All episodes: looksgoodonpaper.willo.video

    POWERED BY WILLO
    www.willo.video

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

    If this one landed with someone on your hiring team, send it to them. Follow Looks Good on Paper wherever you listen so you get every Season 4 conversation.

    Looks Good on Paper is a podcast about hiring, hosted by Anita Chauhan and powered by Willo. In this episode, Leo Harrison, founder and CEO of the embedded talent business Chapter 2, explains why most workforce plans fail on interview capacity rather than candidate supply, why cultural alignment is the bias that survives in companies who believe they have addressed bias, and what he thinks replaces the CV. Season 4 asks what a CV leaves out, on both sides of the hiring table.


    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
    Show More Show Less
    19 mins
  • Years of experience is not a skill

    Years of experience is not a skill
    Aug 12 2026

    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 do not see.

    What he sees now is a labour market worth roughly $8 trillion that almost nobody has real visibility into, and organisations still expected to sound certain when they set a salary band or make a headcount call. That gap between what we actually know and what we perform is what Season 3 of Looks Good on Paper is about.

    In this conversation he makes a case that will make some hiring managers uncomfortable: that years of experience has become a proxy for capability, that most job specs are written to minimise the hiring manager's personal risk rather than to find the best person, and that the cost of this is invisible because you never meet the people you screened out. He would know how thin the correlation is. At 24 he was running a nuclear power plant where the average technician was 23.

    What you'll learn:

    → Why chasing the market on pay is usually the wrong response to a competitor's hiring spree
    → How over-specified job requirements function as a bias that no diversity programme catches
    → Why the CV survives as a screening tool even when it fails as an evaluation tool
    → What it actually takes to read a CV now that both sides of the process are using AI
    → How to use AI agents to prepare for candidate conversations rather than to replace them
    → Why the fastest measurable ROI on AI investment is headcount reduction, and what leaders should do about that

    GUEST
    Cary Sparrow, Founder and CEO,
    WageScape
    LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/carysparrow/
    WageScape: https://wagescape.com

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

    LISTEN AND FOLLOW
    Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/looks-good-on-paper/id1625835562
    YouTube: https://youtu.be/TVuBTavKo4E

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

    CONNECT WITH US
    Looks Good on Paper is a podcast about skills-based hiring, the signals we trust, and the ones we should stop trusting. Season 4 is called More Than a CV.

    If this episode was useful, share it with someone on your hiring team and subscribe so you don't miss the next one.

    Looks Good on Paper is a B2B podcast about skills-based hiring, hosted by Anita Chauhan and powered by Willo. In this episode, WageScape Founder and CEO Cary Sparrow explains why over-specified job requirements are one of the most damaging and least examined biases in hiring, how real-time labour market data changes pay and headcount decisions, and why the concept of a CV is now broader than a resume on a page.

    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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    23 mins