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.
Looks Good on Paper
Plan Earlier, Hire Smarter: Why Emergency Hires Sabotage Great Decisions
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
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 everyone defends because there wasn't time to do it differently.
The moment you're hiring urgently is the moment your standards are most likely to slip and your biases are most likely to take over. Charisma reads as competence. Confidence reads as capability. And the hire that felt right in the moment becomes the problem six months later.
Tia Fomenoff, VP of People at PurposeMed, has spent her career building the people infrastructure that prevents these moments from happening. In this episode of Looks Good on Paper, she breaks down why charisma bias thrives in emergency conditions, how burnout distorts hiring judgment, and what proactive workforce planning actually looks like before you're scrambling to fill a gap.
What you'll learn:
→ Why reactive hiring amplifies bias even in well-intentioned teams
→ How charisma bias takes over when decisions are made under pressure
→ What proactive headcount planning looks like at an early-stage company
⏱ Episode Chapters
00:00 - Welcome & intro to Tia Fomenoff
00:47 - From nonprofit work to tech & people leadership
02:48 - Why Tia joined PurposeMed
03:41 - The biggest hiring mistake: waiting too long
05:25 - Reactive hiring, burnout, and exhausted leaders
06:09 - Planning proactively with hiring managers
07:47 - Hidden bias: charisma vs substance
09:56 - How introverted candidates get overlooked
10:50 - Can you remove CVs from hiring?
11:25 - Application questions, cover letters, and effort
13:10 - Offering candidates choice in interviews
14:45 - Hiring trends for 2026: AI with intention
16:40 - Long-term sourcing and building pipelines early
17:10 - Wrap-up and what's next
GUEST
Tia Fomenoff — VP of People, PurposeMed
LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/in/tiafomenoff/
YOUR HOSTS
Anita Chauhan — Fractional CMO, co-host
LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/in/anitachauhan/
LISTEN & FOLLOW
Spotify → https://open.spotify.com/show/0dbfz6y0tMq3crViHQD66H
Apple Podcasts → https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/id1625835562
All episodes → https://looksgoodonpaper.buzzsprout.com
WATCH ON YOUTUBE - https://youtu.be/-pQoGAfacxI
POWERED BY WILLO
Hire humans, not resumes → https://www.willo.video/looks-good-on-paper
CONNECT WITH US
LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/company/10170893
If this episode changed how you think about hiring, share it with one person who needs to hear it. And subscribe — we're rewriting the rules of hiring, one episode at a time.
Emergency hiring is where bias does its most damage. When a role needs to be filled urgently, interviewers under pressure default to charisma as a proxy for competence and confidence as a proxy for capability. Neither reliably predicts performance. The cost of a rushed hire almost always exceeds the cost of the gap it was meant to fill.
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
