Looks Good on Paper

Experience Doesn't Always Equal Competence - David Hiford (Episode 8)

• Andrew Wood (aka Woody), Anita Chauhan • Season 1 • Episode 8

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David Hiford, Lead Talent Acquisition at Hitachi Rail, challenges the dangerous assumption that experience always equals competence. With nearly four years in recruitment across New Zealand and the UK, David has witnessed firsthand how companies miss out on exceptional talent by refusing to consider career switchers, from engineers becoming project managers to military personnel transitioning to civilian roles.

In this episode, David reveals the hidden conformity bias that's creating homogenous workforces and limiting organizational strength. He shares why hiring managers gravitate toward candidates who mirror their own educational backgrounds and experience, particularly in industries like finance where Russell Group university preferences still dominate decision-making. David's insights on unconscious bias training and the importance of acknowledging our inherent biases provide a roadmap for more inclusive hiring practices.

David's surprising hire story perfectly illustrates his philosophy of prioritizing potential over paper credentials. His approach to spotting talent comes down to one fundamental question: "Do you feel like this is a good person?" This human-centered perspective, combined with skills-based assessment tools, has helped him build stronger, more diverse teams at Hitachi Rail while navigating the complexities of organizational mergers and transformations.

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Welcome to Looks Good on Paper, the podcast that's flipping the script on traditional hiring. We're your hosts. I'm Woody. And I'm Anita. And in each episode we dive into why CVS and the so-called perfect candidate can be misleading. We'll be speaking with industry experts to uncover how skills, potential, and real world experience should be the focus when making hiring decisions. We are here to challenge the norm and rewrite the rules of hiring. So let's get started. Hi everyone. Welcome to this episode of Looks Good On Paper. This week we are delighted to be joined by, uh, David Hiford from Hitachi Rail, um, lead talent acquirer within the business. So very excited to get your opinion on, I guess what. Looks good on paper means to you. So how do you challenge the use of CVS and the traditional recruitment methods, um, of the modern day? Uh, that should probably be relegated to the past. Anita is also joining us from Bali, which is awesome. So amazing. Any, any fun things going on in Bali, Anita? It's hot. It's one, one season for a whole year, and I have not seen any monkeys yet, which I'm so sad about. But it's lovely here and I feel like I'm on like a field trip, but it is. It's late at night for me right now, so that's been really fun navigating that. Nice. Yeah. Well, thank you for joining us late night. Um, rather than me trying to do your introduction, David, I, uh, would love to hand over to you and just get a quick background on yourself, um, and obviously your role over at Hitachi Rail. And then I'll jump into our first question. Absolutely. Thanks very much for, for having me. Really excited to be here. the talent acquisition lead for Hitachi Rail. I've been here now for two and a half years. before that I spent, I. nearly four years in recruitment in both New Zealand and the uk. so I first got into recruitment whilst I was working and living in New Zealand. Worked for one of the big global, agency brands, and then came back to the uk. At the start of 2022, spent a few months in an agency role, back in the uk and then moved into, into my role internally here at Hitachi Rail. The real driver for me going internal was the project that we had at Hitachi Rail. We were going through a merger, a separation from a much larger company into a standalone kind of holding company, and then into a merger into a, an even bigger company. And so that interim period of setting up processes, streamlining, everything that we could do, really redesigning how we recruited that was the real. Attraction and driver for me into taking this role and what's kept me engaged and happy for the last few years as well. Nice. I bet working for three different companies whilst also working at the same company is quite a unique Yeah, especially in two and a half years. yeah, yeah. So, let's dive into the questions. the first question and the, you know, we asked the same three questions of every, of every recruitment leader that we speak to. And the first question is, what's the biggest hiring mistake that you see companies make time and time again, even though they know, you know, candidates know that it's probably not working. for me one of the most, kind of obvious when you think about it answers to that question is the career switches kind of answer. So I look at job adverts all day long, whether they be my own or somebody else's, or other companies. You see so often that you know, and it links to that other, point of experience, not always equaling competence. not considering people that can come from a different background, not considering project managers that used to be engineers. For example, you know, some of our project managers in Hitachi Rail used to be engineers and they're absolutely great at what they do 'cause they understand. How to run the project, but also how to run the engineering side of the project. you know, adding into that things like people coming back from maternity or paternity leave, people coming out of the, the military and, you know, switching a career from what could have been a very linear pathway for the last 20 years in a military role, then going into civilian society, um, that career switch, there's so much opportunity there. A lot of businesses just don't tap into and are afraid to tap into for the sake of having to spend a little bit of time at the start training somebody up then having, you know, some of the most motivated people you'll ever see. you know, I've recruited recently, in a data science role and I had so many people reach out to me saying, you know, I work in a different field altogether, but data fascinates me and I've gone away and I've. Researched it myself, I've studied myself. I've self-funded, through different various courses that I really want to get into data. So there's a real opportunity and a wealth of talent there available that doesn't just necessarily have, the experience on, on the CB that a lot of companies just ask for. That's true. It's so funny, I always bring this up as well when we talk about, you know, competency based or skills based hiring, I actually, I, I'm a marketer and a fractional CMO and I don't have a degree in marketing. And I think about just like through job and people, like, through jobs and people giving me a chance, I was actually able to show that I could do the job and do it well. And I've been now in this, like, this field for 15 years, like just. Who would I have been if I didn't get that shot? Or if somebody said, you know, let's given you a chance and look at her over someone who has a marketing degree. Yeah, definitely that, those transferable skills. You know, I like, I think we, we discussed earlier, you know, I, I studied radio production at university. I, you know, I'm working in a talent acquisition role, but what that gives me is. The ability to interview people, to talk to people, to actively listen, to engage people, to to write copy, to, you know, to, to, to write adverts in, in a different tone of voice. So all of those different skills that I learned in my degree, that doesn't necessarily land me in a, in a HR position. It's how how much of it, um, do you think is. Is, you talked about the, the sort of unwillingness to train an individual up that is switching careers. How much of it is that versus. A hiring manager, just not feeling confident that they know what skills somebody has. So you talked about obviously the person not being able to display those skills on a CV and the hiring manager basically looking at it and going, yeah, well how do I know that this person is any good and that they are gonna be coachable in what we do? Yeah, I think there, there is obviously an element of the unknown that will always come along with that. but yeah, it's a valid point, you know, If you're looking for a particular set of skills and you see that, that those, you know, traditionally you see those skills always come from the same place and the same linear career pathway. You know, it, there's an education piece there for the hiring managers around, you know, where else could these skills be acquired from. I think there's also a bit of an education piece for the general candidate market as well in how to market your own skills. how to engage with companies and recruiters and really sell yourself, um, in terms of everything that you can do rather than you know, what you have done. I think there's, there's gotta be that kind of shift from what you have done to what you can do, and that's, that's what, you know, that's the potential you can unlock in that career switcher conversation. Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting and, and I think that's the thing about. You know, why we wanna get rid of the CV is it doesn't work for either party. It's not like it's, you know, great for candidates. Yeah. Once you've written it, you can send it to everybody, but it actually doesn't tell people how good you are or whether you've got the skills to be successful. okay. Great. Next question. What's a hidden bias that companies unknowingly have even when they think. Do you know what we've put in loads of progressive new initiatives as a business? Like what's the thing that gets left behind that, that, you know, maybe I, I, I mean, part of your first answer probably, probably is one of the hidden biases, but can you think of any others? there's so many and we'll see so many more that are not necessarily unconscious any longer, especially with, you know, the global trend towards the AI policies. that's driven, you know, mainly outta the us. But I think looking back on my kind of agency career, I spent the majority of my agency career recruiting in finance. And not to pick on finance, but it's a particularly bad industry to recruit for in terms of bias. in the UK finance market, for example, you'll have. Hiring managers who say, I only want candidates who studied a CA, not a C, CA and not a gotta be a CA candidates. and that's, you know, that's not even an unconscious bias at that point, that that's very overt, bias, but That kind of attitude then flows down through to, you know, where did this, where did they go to university? Did they go to a Russell Group University? And it links into that, you know, experience, bracket as well, you know, where have they worked before? Have they done this before? Have they done that before? it's, it lends itself to, to, to hiring in that kind of conformity bias model where, you know, you, you, you, you stick to what you know. You know what, you know, you, you know the qualifications, you know, the, the universities, and you, you end up with a, you know, homogenous workforce, which, you know, it then creates all sorts of other DEI issues and, lack of strength in a lot of organizations.'cause that diversity just isn't there any longer. So, you know, the, kind of hidden. Unconscious bias there is, is probably around, you know, that confirmation bias or conformity bias around, you know, do, does this person look, sound, have the same experience as me, and. You know, the important thing that we've tried to do at Hitachi Rail is work with our hiring managers to say, you know, we all have bias. It's important that, you know, everybody has it. We have to acknowledge that we have it, but we then need to work against it in these kind of scenarios. be conscious of it. Yes, you, you know, you may look at somebody who's gone to the same university as you, and you have a common ground to, to begin a conversation from. That does not mean that they will have the same experience as you, does not mean they'll have the same, knowledge and expertise as you. It just means that they happen to go to a certain place in the country at, at the, you know, at the, the same as you did. So, mean, that's one of the, one of the hardest ones. And, you know, we've, worked with you guys at Willow in our early careers recruitment for a few years now. And, you know, particularly at that graduate recruitment level, you know, stripping away the universities that, that, that kind of, that's went to is really, really useful. because that, you know, particularly early careers level, obviously we need to know. They're studying a relevant degree. For example, if they're coming into an engineering grad scheme, you know, that they've studied engineering, for example, but where they've studied it's, it's not important. So I think not relevant. exactly, I think that that's one of the, one of the biggest ones. And that's, I say I don't particularly wanna pick on finance, but it was fairly, um, fairly overt in that sense where, Really, it's, it's conformity bias. I don't think people call it that very often, but uh, you know, 'cause I always say, oh, nobody gets fired for. choosing IBM, that old adage, just like nobody gets fired for using Microsoft or whatever. It's the same, like, I think people just have that fear and therefore conform and everybody looks like this in the company so that we, and we know that works. You know, that's the, that's the dangerous thing is a few individuals that look and sound a specific way perform. So we'll hire all of our people that look and sound like that. We'll, forget the ones that didn't perform, you know, we'll forget the ones that we actually got rid of because these few are such top performers. Um, so yeah, that's a really good conformity bias. something to be conscious of in the future. Okay, so our, our next question and then we've got our wild card, which Anita will present to you. Um, the next question is, what's. If you can remember, it'd be awesome. If you can think of a, a specific individual. What's the most surprising hire that you've ever made? Um, and how did their success defy what looked good on paper I. I've got, I've got an example where this is both good and bad in all honesty. Um, so we'll start with a good, I hired a guy probably about six months into my role at Hitachi Rail where, On paper didn't have a wealth of experience in the particular field that I hired them into. you know, they were not a career switcher, but they had been certainly, you know, they got experience across multiple types of roles, not always in the same kind of space. you know, they, they kind of engaged well during kind of my screening processes. they'd come to interview and performed well, but there was still other people in the process that were much more experienced in that particular field. you know, through the process we decided to go with, this guy, brought him into the team, spent a little bit of time, you know, nurturing him into the role, and kind of almost two years down the line, he's now. Training other people. He's really, really settled into his role. I even have comments from managers in other departments about him, uh, about how good he is at his role, and you know, how well he works with the team and how well he's, his role integrates with different people from the project across, across the business. So, you know, from a, from a positive standpoint, that was, you know, a, um, a really, really positive example. On the flip side, I also hired somebody, um, I. excited about this one now. I always love bad, bad recruitment stories. yeah. On the flip side, I, I hired somebody from a direct competitor who had come to us and said, look, I really like what you're doing. Like the look of this role. I know the hiring manager from just being in the industry, you know, really wanna work for that hiring manager, on paper had all the experience we wanted, if not maybe a little bit more experience than we needed. But, you know, we were like, you know, this guy really wants to come over. Our hiring manager had such an attraction for him that, you know, he wanted to come and work for him and leave his current role like this. Sounds great. brought him in and within a few months we realized that. We'd potentially made a bad hire. the, the stakeholder engagement piece was, was quite off. there was, you know, little bits here and there where it wasn't really the best hire that we've made. And then, you know, via mutual consent and that person left the business, still within their probation period. So on paper everything looked great. You know, they were direct competitor. We were, you know, ex exact example of experience that, the rest of the team had. He worked on the same tools, same technologies, on paper couldn't have been a bit higher, but in reality didn't work out whatsoever. But I'll focus on the first story though, the Yeah, those are the wins we wanna hear the stories of the wins. I think it's so nice when you see someone thrive when you like the unexpected ones, right? I mean, I've been hiring manager before for my line of business. A lot of companies I worked at, and I think like, you know. Sometimes there's just like this gut intuition for me where it's like, oh, this person shows up in these different ways where I can see through this process. And yeah, you know, like you said, this other person was up against the loss of candidates that probably had more experience, but there's something that, that person, and I'm not sure what it is sometimes, but it just, it works and then you see them grow and it's amazing. this really segues well into the wild card question for you, David. Uh, so how do you spa potential when it doesn't always follow the rules? I think for me, the, the, the very basic principle it has to go down to is, uh, you know, do you feel like this is a good person? ultimately, Why talent acquisition is so hard, it's because your product, for example is people. And people are very unreliable. The, the most unreliable product you ever wear is probably, you know, people have free will and they, they have lots of, lots of, lots of nuances that you, that you need to deal with ev every single time. It comes down to every organization is only as strong as the people that works for it. And if the people that work for the organization are good people at their core and at their heart, the business should thrive. We as people who also work for the business should, you know, be able to, to bring them on board and bring them on, on the journey with us. So there's so many different metrics that you can assess that, you know, everyone's got a different opinion on what, on what you should assess and what you can assess. so, you know, in, in, in the face of all of that, if, if there's no, if there's nothing else to go on, you know, I would, I would personally go on my assessment of whether this is a good person or not. Yeah. Or put them through a willow with some skills-based hiring questions. See if they're coachable. See if you can grow them in that role. Super simple. Yeah, Shameless. Shameless. That Anita, That's the plug. so true. Where's the lie Woody? Brilliant answer. Thank you David. so yeah, thank you so much for coming on the, looks good on paper. Podcast. It's been awesome to hear your very quick overview. my biggest takeaway is to really think about conformity bias and how we can, I guess, raise awareness in individuals that, you know, conforming to what they believe their perception of conformity. or, you know, process and not really challenging what that means in their organization and what good looks like off paper, is, uh, you know, leading to them potentially hiring the wrong people. Much like the, the example that you gave. I feel like we could do a whole podcast, Anita, just asking, for war stories of where things have gone wrong as well. I think that could be very entertaining. maybe we just do one, one episode where we just cut all of those. Um, but yeah. Thank you David so much for, uh, for joining us on the podcast and thanks everybody for listening. for having you. See you. soon. Bye. So thanks for tuning in to Looks Good on Paper. We hope today's conversation helps you rethink what really matters when it comes to hiring. Don't forget to subscribe, share with your network, and stay tuned for more insightful discussions that are shaking up the entire hiring process. Catch us next time as we continue to challenge the status quo. Until then, remember, it's not what looks good on paper, it's what they can do.

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Andrew Wood (aka Woody)

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