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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
Years of experience is not a skill
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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 the requirements themselves. Cary Sparrow thinks that is where the real damage is being done.
Cary is the Founder and CEO of WageScape, a platform tracking global hiring activity, pay movement, and talent supply and demand in real time. Before that he spent 35 years across engineering, the US Navy, global consulting, and corporate HR leadership. The through line, in his words, is looking for the things other people do not see.
What he sees now is a labour market worth roughly $8 trillion that almost nobody has real visibility into, and organisations still expected to sound certain when they set a salary band or make a headcount call. That gap between what we actually know and what we perform is what Season 3 of Looks Good on Paper is about.
In this conversation he makes a case that will make some hiring managers uncomfortable: that years of experience has become a proxy for capability, that most job specs are written to minimise the hiring manager's personal risk rather than to find the best person, and that the cost of this is invisible because you never meet the people you screened out. He would know how thin the correlation is. At 24 he was running a nuclear power plant where the average technician was 23.
What you'll learn:
→ Why chasing the market on pay is usually the wrong response to a competitor's hiring spree
→ How over-specified job requirements function as a bias that no diversity programme catches
→ Why the CV survives as a screening tool even when it fails as an evaluation tool
→ What it actually takes to read a CV now that both sides of the process are using AI
→ How to use AI agents to prepare for candidate conversations rather than to replace them
→ Why the fastest measurable ROI on AI investment is headcount reduction, and what leaders should do about that
GUEST
Cary Sparrow, Founder and CEO,
WageScape
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/carysparrow/
WageScape: https://wagescape.com
YOUR HOST
Anita Chauhan
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anitachauhan/
LISTEN AND FOLLOW
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/looks-good-on-paper/id1625835562
YouTube: https://youtu.be/TVuBTavKo4E
POWERED BY WILLO
https://www.willo.video/looks-good-on-paper
CONNECT WITH US
Looks Good on Paper is a podcast about skills-based hiring, the signals we trust, and the ones we should stop trusting. Season 4 is called More Than a CV.
If this episode was useful, share it with someone on your hiring team and subscribe so you don't miss the next one.
Looks Good on Paper is a B2B podcast about skills-based hiring, hosted by Anita Chauhan and powered by Willo. In this episode, WageScape Founder and CEO Cary Sparrow explains why over-specified job requirements are one of the most damaging and least examined biases in hiring, how real-time labour market data changes pay and headcount decisions, and why the concept of a CV is now broader than a resume on a page.
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
