Shows / Looks Good on Paper
Looks Good on Paper
Looks Good on Paper flips hiring on its head. Hosted by Andrew Wood and Anita Chauhan, we dive into why CVs and "perfect fits" are overrated. Through fun, insightful conversations with industry experts, we explore how skills, potential, and real experience should be the focus of hiring... not what looks good on paper.
Quick, candid, and packed with actionable insights, we’re here to rewrite the rules of hiring, one episode at a time.
Episodes
Looks Good on PaperWhy quality of hire beats time to fill, with Robert Liedtka of Gong
Quality of hire, AI in recruiting, and hiring beyond the CV, with Gong’s Robert Liedtka. Most talent teams still report on how fast they hired, and almost none…
Looks Good on PaperHiring for judgment, not unicorns, with Natasha Lakhani of Super.com
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…
- Looks Good on Paper
Coherence bias and the four-question screening call, with Chrissy Oni of Stagwell Global
Structured interviews, coherence bias and hiring beyond the CV. Most hiring processes are built to find people who interview well. Chrissy Oni, Talent…
Looks Good on PaperUntrained Interviewers and the Culture Fit Myth, with Jay Guney
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…
Looks Good on PaperHiring for potential, not perfection, with Daniel Hackett of Amazon
Military hiring, alternative talent pipelines and candidate-led recruitment, with Daniel Hackett of Amazon. Most hiring starts with the business. What does the…
Looks Good on PaperWhy years of experience predicts almost nothing, with Heidi Wassini of Viebke & West
Skills-based hiring, ageism, and what the research says about years of experience, with Heidi Wassini, Chief People Officer at Viebke & West. Most hiring…
Looks Good on PaperWhy more interviews mean worse hires, with Kanwar Kohli of Booking.com
Hiring bias, AI screening and skills-based hiring at global scale, with Kanwar Kohli, Senior Leader for Global Talent Delivery at Booking.com. Most…
Looks Good on PaperWhy hiring plans fail, with Leo Harrison of Chapter 2
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…
Looks Good on PaperYears of experience is not a skill
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…
Looks Good on PaperI don't read CVs and I don't hire locally
Most hiring leaders will tell you they hire for skills. Then they open a CV, scan for a university name, check a location field, and quietly filter out…
Looks Good on PaperMake sure they pass the vibe check - Recfest UK 2026
A CV is the one document where people are trusted to describe themselves, and it is also the one place they are most careful to leave things out. Not the…
Looks Good on PaperWe show up at work as our full selves. CVs won't let us.
We took a camera around RecFest 2026 and asked one question over and over: what's something about yourself that would never show up on a CV? We got a singer. A…
Looks Good on PaperThe CV is the global currency for jobs. And it's fundamentally flawed.
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…
Looks Good on PaperAthletes try out. Why don't your candidates?
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…
Looks Good on PaperThe 24-Hour Promise
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…
Looks Good on PaperStop Hiring Three Juniors When You Need One Senior.
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…
Looks Good on PaperYour Best Hire Won't Look Good on Paper
"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…
Looks Good on PaperWhy Shopify Asks Every Candidate to Tell Their Life Story
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…
Looks Good on PaperShe scaled to 1,500 people and wants to BURN the hiring process down
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…
Looks Good on PaperA Candidate on My Call Was Impersonating a Dead Person
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…
Looks Good on PaperReward the Skill, Not the Performance
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…
Looks Good on Paper"He Interviewed Well. That Was the Problem."
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…
Looks Good on PaperThe Skills-Based Economy Arrived Five Years Ago
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…
Looks Good on PaperLearning Velocity Is the New Superpower
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…
Looks Good on PaperThe Hiring Bias Nobody Thinks They Have
Most companies believe they've moved past credential bias. They've rewritten their job descriptions, dropped degree requirements, maybe even adopted skills…
Looks Good on PaperIt's Just Robots Hanging Out: What's Actually Happening in Hiring Right Now
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…
Looks Good on PaperBetter Hiring Without the Noise: Why Hiring Feels Over-Engineered (and How to Fix It)
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…
Looks Good on PaperThey Belong in a Museum: Why Most Resumes Say Nothing at All
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…
Looks Good on PaperStop Hiring for Titles: What Startup Hiring Actually Requires
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…
Looks Good on PaperFair, Equitable Hiring Needs a Retention Strategy (S2E14)
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…
Looks Good on PaperWhy Hiring More People Is the Wrong Fix (And What High-Growth Companies Do Instead) (S2E12)
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…
Looks Good on PaperThe Real Reason CVs Are Failing: 8 Leaders on Volume, Bias, and What Comes Next
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…
Looks Good on PaperPlan Earlier, Hire Smarter: Why Emergency Hires Sabotage Great Decisions
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…
Looks Good on PaperWhat 74% of Companies Are Getting Wrong - and Why They Lose Out on Great Talent (S2E10)
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 —…
Looks Good on PaperSame Work, Same Pay: Why Pay Transparency Changes Everything About Who Gets Hired
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…
Looks Good on PaperDon’t Trust the First 10%: Process Is the Problem, Says Ashby’s Jim Miller (S2E8)
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…
Looks Good on PaperHuman-Centric Hiring At Scale - Inside Clio’s Global Talent Expansion (S2E7)
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…
Looks Good on PaperAI Changed What Qualified Means — What Early-Stage Founders Need to Know
Early-stage founders make the same hiring mistakes with striking consistency: they hire for the role they can describe rather than the work they actually need…
Looks Good on PaperTrash the CV: 90 Seconds Beats 10 Years (Miovision) - (S2E5)
What if your best hire lists 4 years on paper, but delivers 8 years of outcomes? Miovision’s Global Talent Acquisition Manager Justin Krulicki, breaks down why…
Looks Good on PaperStop Hiring Your Mirror: Culture Add vs. Culture Fit
Culture fit is one of the most expensive myths in hiring. When companies screen for fit, they tend to screen for sameness — people who think, communicate, and…
Looks Good on PaperWhy 1,000 Applications Means You're Doing It Wrong - Anuj Rastogi (S2E3)
If you're getting 1,000 applications for a single role, the problem isn't that you have too many candidates. The problem is that your hiring process has no…
Looks Good on PaperWhat Really Drives Great Hires? The Fundamentals Most Companies Skip
After a decade embedded in the Toronto tech ecosystem — including time as Executive in Residence at MaRS — Daneal Charney has seen every version of hiring go…
Looks Good on Paper9 Leaders, 1 Question, Hidden Hiring Truths: Tech for Canada Conference + Season 2 Preview
What happens when 9 of Canada’s top hiring leaders get brutally honest about bias? During Tech for Canada Conference, we captured raw, unfiltered insights from…
Looks Good on PaperExperience Doesn't Always Equal Competence - David Hiford (Episode 8)
Years on a resume is not the same thing as the ability to do the work. It's one of the most persistent assumptions in hiring — and one of the most expensive. A…
Looks Good on PaperStop Hiring People You Want to Drink With: Affinity Bias in Recruiting
If your hiring decision includes any version of 'I could see myself having a drink with this person,' you have a bias problem masquerading as an instinct…
Looks Good on PaperLinkedIn Is the Tinder of Recruiting — And It's Producing the Same Results
Swipe right on the right credentials, hope for a match, and call it recruiting. LinkedIn has turned talent acquisition into a pattern-matching exercise — and…
Looks Good on PaperThe 70K to 500K Talent Secret: What the Best Hires Have in Common
The candidates most companies are sleeping on aren't hard to find. They're just being filtered out by job descriptions designed to attract the people who…
Looks Good on PaperThe Job Ad Is Dead — And Most Companies Haven't Noticed Yet
Nobody reads job ads the way companies write them. And the best candidates — the ones not actively looking — aren't reading them at all. The job ad as a…
Looks Good on PaperChallenging Hiring Norms: What Looks Good on Paper Gets Hiring Wrong
The rules of hiring were written for a different era, by people who needed to manage risk at scale, not find the best person for a specific job. Most of those…
Looks Good on PaperNeurodiversity and AI in Hiring: Who Gets Filtered Out Before Anyone Sees Them
Most hiring processes were designed without neurodivergent candidates in mind — and it shows. Timed assessments, unstructured interviews, rigid communication…
Looks Good on PaperWhy the Perfect Candidate on Paper Is Often the Wrong Hire
The candidate who looks perfect on paper — right school, right company, right titles — is often not the right hire. Not because the credentials are irrelevant…
Looks Good on Paper#44 - Inside the World of School Recruitment - Artimese Braddy Lawrence
In this episode of the Recruitment Reality Podcast, I am joined by Artimese Braddy Lawrence, Coordinator of Human Resources at Tyler ISD, the largest school…
Looks Good on Paper#43 - Peer-to-Peer Learning for Talent Acquisition - Joe Atkinson
In this episode of the Recruitment Reality Podcast, I am joined by Joe Atkinson, Founder at PURPL, a peer-to-peer learning platform built by talent acquisition…
Looks Good on Paper#42 - Web Design for Recruitment Agencies - Robert Garner
In this episode of the Recruitment Reality Podcast, I am joined by Robert Garner, Director at Abstraction Labs, a recruitment website design & development…
Looks Good on Paper#41 - Cultivating & Nurturing All-Stars Within Your Team - Ahva Sadeghi
In this episode of the Recruitment Reality Podcast, I am joined by Ahva Sadeghi, CEO/Co-founder at Symba, an innovative onboarding and talent management…
Looks Good on Paper#40 - Attracting Talent Worldwide: Valuing Candidate’s Potential - Dace Straupmane
In this episode of the Recruitment Reality Podcast, I am joined by Dace Straupmane, a Talent Acquisition Manager at SmartLynx, an aviation lending company…
Looks Good on Paper#39 - Bridging the Gap: Early Careers Initiatives - Yasmin Castle
In this episode of the Recruitment Reality Podcast, I am joined by Yasmin Castle, a Talent Acquisition Specialist at Ideagen, a global software company based…
Looks Good on Paper#38 - The Power of a Strong USP: Niche Recruitment Can Thrive in Challenging Times - Rosa Hilmi
In this episode of the Recruitment Reality Podcast, I am joined by Rosa Hilmi, the co-founder and managing director of Stellar Select, a niche recruitment…
Looks Good on Paper#37 - Recruitment Challenges and Innovations in Hiring - Sean Allen
In this week's episode of the Recruitment Reality Podcast, I had the pleasure of speaking with Sean Allen, a prominent figure in the talent acquisition…
Looks Good on Paper#36 - Why You Shouldn't Neglect Old School Recruitment Skills - Harvey Bass
In this episode of The Recruitment Reality Podcast, I had the pleasure of talking with Harvey Bass from Stascom about how he has maintained his business over…