Hiring for what the CV Can’t Show

Recruiting, developing and keeping adaptable people.

As organisations adapt to rapid technological and workplace change, leaders face a harder question than simply where to find the right skills: how do you identify people with the curiosity, judgement and adaptability to keep evolving as the work itself changes?

In this Accomplish More discussion, senior leaders came together to compare how they are recruiting, developing and retaining adaptable people, and to challenge some of the assumptions built into traditional hiring and development.

Their conversation explored everything from what experience means in an AI-enabled workplace and whether adaptability can be taught, to what keeps good people once they’re hired and how the next generation will enter the workforce.

Built from the experience in the room

Accomplish More is a peer community where senior business leaders come together to share experience, challenge perspectives and explore real-world business issues. This article draws on a workshop discussion between members, bringing together their insights, practical experiences and different points of view on recruiting and developing adaptable people.

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The discussion covered six themes:

1. Why long experience turned out to matter more than expected once AI takes on routine work
2. How job briefs and search processes narrow the field before anyone is interviewed
3. Whether adaptability can be taught or only spotted
4. What keeps people once they are hired
5. Why flexibility only holds when it runs both ways
6. How people will now enter the workforce at all

The group’s shared view was that the qualities organisations most need rarely show up in a job title or a CV.

Those qualities include curiosity, a willingness to adapt, the ability to learn and the judgement to question and answer. Finding them depends as much on how leaders brief, interview and talk to people as on who applies. Members were less settled on the entry-level question, and this paper leaves it open rather than presenting an answer the group didn’t reach.