The Hiring Brief

A short series on how hiring is changing.

Hiring teams have more candidate information than ever. More profiles. More assessments. More AI-assisted applications.

But more information has not created more confidence.

The Hiring Brief explores one idea at a time — what has changed, what current systems miss, and what a better way of hiring could look like. The thinking here is informed by more than two decades of hiring engineers, building teams, and making hundreds of hiring decisions.

Hiring changed

Hiring hasn't become harder because people changed. It became harder because the questions changed.

In 2005, the path was short: a resume, an interview, a decision.

In 2026, it has multiplied: a resume, a LinkedIn profile, assessments, AI-generated profiles, and several interview rounds — all feeding a single decision.

The compression problem

The resume compresses your experience.

Real work is textured:

• Recovered a six-hour production incident
• Mentored an engineer into leadership
• Challenged an architecture decision
• Managed a difficult trade-off
• Took ownership when something failed

The resume flattens all of it into three lines:

• Led backend migration.
• Improved system performance by 40%.
• Built APIs for the payments platform.

The reset problem

Even when the evidence exists, the hiring process forgets it altogether.

A professional proves themselves at one company. Then they interview at the next, and the next, and the next — and every time, they begin again from nothing.

Every company starts from zero.

A better way

The interview starts where the evidence ends.

Some things can be known before the interview. Others still need to be explored. The best interviews spend their time on what remains genuinely open — not re-confirming what the evidence already shows.

The learning loop

Every hire teaches us something. Most hiring systems never ask what it was.

Evidence leads to a decision. The decision produces an outcome. The outcome should feed learning — and learning should produce better evidence the next time. Most processes break the loop the moment the decision is made.

Professional Brain

Professional Brain remembers what resumes lose.

It is a persistent memory that grows as a professional's work grows:

• Project ownership — delivers outcomes and builds trust
• A production decision — a sound call made under pressure
• Mentoring — develops others and builds capability
• A promotion — recognised for impact and leadership
• A new role — greater scope and new challenges

A persistent memory of a professional's work, decisions, growth, and demonstrated capability — carried forward, not reset.

If these ideas resonate, this is where the conversation continues.