.png)
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
71 episodes
It'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 screening tools that were never built for the volume they're now processing: the signal-to...
•
Season 2
•
Episode 18
•
13:54
.png)
Better 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 heavier — and candidates can feel it.The irony is that teams adding complexity are...
•
Season 2
•
Episode 17
•
18:06
They 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 documents that tell them almost nothing about whether someone can actually do the wo...
•
Season 2
•
Episode 16
•
21:01
Stop 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 have titles yet.Most early-stage hiring fails because founders write job desc...
•
Season 2
•
Episode 15
•
22:24
Fair, 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 they worked hardest to recruit have already left.Diversity hiring without a reten...
•
Season 2
•
Episode 14
•
19:49
Why 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 early, too often, and without enough clarity about what problem it's actually solving...
•
Season 2
•
Episode 12
•
22:37
The 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 conversation covered AI-generated applications flooding pipelines, the bias ba...
•
Season 2
•
5:57
.png)
Plan 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 thin. Reactive hiring doesn't just produce bad hires — it produces bad hires that every...
•
Season 2
•
Episode 11
•
17:57
What 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 — timezone-incompatible interview windows, slow communication loops, screening tools cali...
•
Season 2
•
Episode 10
•
17:25
Same 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 companies — even the ones who claim to value equity — are still building compensation struc...
•
Season 2
•
Episode 9
•
21:23
Don’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 filters sort for network proximity. Initial calls sort for presentation confidence. ...
•
Season 2
•
Episode 6
•
17:32
Human-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 erodes trust in the company. Scaling talent acquisition without turning it into a proc...
•
Season 2
•
Episode 6
•
21:40
AI 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 done, they over-index on pedigree because it feels safe, and they underestimate how m...
•
Season 2
•
Episode 6
•
15:24
Trash 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 tenure and industry bias are quietly derailing your hiring proce...
•
Season 2
•
Episode 5
•
13:45
Stop 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 look like the people already in the room. The result is a team that gets along well a...
•
Season 2
•
Episode 4
•
15:28
Why 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 filter — and no real signal about what you're actually looking for.High applicati...
•
Season 2
•
Episode 3
•
18:01
What 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 right and go wrong. The patterns that produce great hires aren't mysterious. Most comp...
•
Season 2
•
Episode 2
•
19:19
.png)
9 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 executives at Microsoft, Deloitte, True Search, and more. From “pedigree bias” to co...
•
Season 2
•
5:06
Experience 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 candidate with 15 years of experience can be deeply incompetent at the thing you act...
•
Season 1
•
Episode 8
•
18:53
.png)
Stop 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. Affinity bias doesn't feel like bias when it's happening. It feels like good judgment.
•
Season 1
•
Episode 7
•
19:03
%20(1).png)
LinkedIn 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 most people playing it aren't finding what they're actually looking for.The inf...
•
Season 1
•
Episode 6
•
17:37
.png)
The 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 already have the job, salary bands that haven't moved with the market, and sourcing strate...
•
Season 1
•
Episode 5
•
18:32
.png)
The 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 recruiting tool had a good run. It's over.The companies still investing in job descr...
•
Season 1
•
Episode 4
•
19:57
.png)
Challenging 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 rules are still in place — and most of them are quietly producing worse outcomes than...
•
Season 1
•
Episode 3
•
19:58
.png)
Neurodiversity 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 norms: the standard screening gauntlet systematically removes people whose brains work...
•
Season 1
•
Episode 2
•
19:52
.png)