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Why Your CV Obsession Is Costing You Good Hires
I’ve seen it a thousand times. A founder sends me a CV – usually three or four pages, neat formatting, impressive company names. Then I meet the candidate. And within ten minutes of conversation, it’s clear: the CV lied.
Not on purpose. It’s just that a piece of paper can’t tell you how someone actually thinks, how they communicate when they’re stressed, or whether they’ll energise or drain your team. After 27 years in recruitment, I’ve learned that the founders who consistently hire well aren’t the ones obsessed with credentials. They’re the ones who know what they’re actually looking for.
The Problem With Filtering by CV
When you lead with a CV, you’re measuring the wrong things. A CV shows you the past. It tells you where someone went to school, which companies they worked for, and which job titles they’ve held. But here’s what it doesn’t tell you: How do they handle ambiguity? Can they work directly with a founder without needing layers of management? Will they adapt when the role shifts – because it always does in startups?
I had a client once – a bootstrapped SaaS founder – who’d built his first hire decision around a CV. The candidate had worked at Google, had shipping experience, knew the tech stack cold. Perfect on paper. Within three months, he was gone. Why? Because he needed processes and clarity that simply didn’t exist yet. The founder needed someone who could tolerate chaos. They were incompatible. The mismatch wasn’t about competence. It was about fit. And a CV can’t measure fit.
What CVs Miss (And Why It Matters)
A CV can’t tell you about working style, communication style, or motivation. Only conversation reveals these things. Your startup is probably changing faster than your hire can fully understand – so their ability to adapt matters more than their ability to execute a static job description.
Chemistry First Hiring Starts With Knowing Yourself
Here’s what changes the equation: Before you even look at a candidate, you need to know what you actually need. What’s your working style? Are you someone who needs to talk things through, or do you prefer time to think? Do you make decisions fast or slow?
Once you know that, you can have real conversations with candidates. Not interviews where you’re ticking boxes against a job spec. But actual dialogues where you’re discovering whether this person will thrive working the way you work, at the pace you work, in the stage of company you’re building. That’s Chemistry First. It’s not about whether they have the perfect CV. It’s about whether they’ll actually accelerate your business.
What to Do Instead
Start here: Write down three things about the way you work that matter most.
For example:
- I need someone who can operate independently.
- I need someone who’s energised by conversations.
- I need someone who can tolerate ambiguity.
Next: Have a conversation with candidates about those three things. Not about their CV. Ask them how they’d handle working the way you work. Ask them about a time they thrived in uncertainty.
Pay attention to how they answer. Not what they say, but how they say it.
- Do they get it?
- Do they light up at the possibility?
- Do you feel understood by them?
That’s chemistry. And it matters infinitely more than where they went to school.
Ready to Hire the Right Way?
If you’re hiring for the first time, or you’ve had bad hires because of CV obsession, it’s worth stepping back and asking:
- What am I actually looking for?
- And am I assessing the right things?
A Hiring Health Check takes 45 minutes. Chemistry First. That’s the approach that builds teams that last. You can book your free Hiring Health Check here with Helen.
Helen Wingrove-Sanders is the founder of HFBAC and author of Hire Ready. With 27 years of recruitment experience, she’s helped over 500 bootstrapped founders make their first five hires using Chemistry First.
