Paula Carrahar, Director at Craft, on why the most important things about a person don’t show up on a CV and why instinct remains a recruiter’s sharpest tool.
Over the years, I’ve met thousands of people. Some I’ve known for decades and others I’ve met once and never forgotten. Many I’ve watched grow into leaders running global teams.
I’m often asked what’s changed most in recruitment over the last 30 years. The obvious answer is technology.
When I started, there wasn’t much of it, and if you wanted to know someone, you spent time with them. Now we know more about candidates on paper than ever, but knowledge doesn’t equal understanding. The more we try to strip judgement out of hiring, the more valuable good judgement becomes.
Don’t get me wrong, technology has its place and it can make hiring faster, but I’ve never believed the most important things about a person show up on a CV.
The longer I do this job, the more convinced I am that people are wonderfully difficult to reduce to a checklist. The best thing about recruitment is that no two people are the same.
You’ll meet someone with the perfect career history – all the right names, a portfolio that ticks every box, and is exactly what a company says it wants. Then you meet them, and something’s missing.
Equally, I’ve met people who look unconventional at first glance. Maybe they’re shy or bad interviewers, with nothing like a straight line through their career, yet they turn out to be exceptional.
Some of my best introductions wouldn’t have happened if I’d stuck to the brief. The ideal candidate isn’t always obvious. Sometimes they’re in a different sector, or took the scenic route to leadership. Instinct tells you they’ll thrive long before the CV does.
So yes, technology is brilliant at finding what you’re looking for, but experience spots what you’d have missed.
Instinct gets dismissed as some fluffy gut feeling that’s unscientific and subjective. I don’t see it that way at all. In my world, instinct is pattern recognition and meeting people over and over and watching how careers unfold. It’s knowing who thrives, who struggles, who grows, and who stays. It’s understanding that a person is more than their job title.
One of the first things I ask candidates isn’t what they do, it’s what they want. What would make them leave a role? What would make them stay? That tells you more than any list of responsibilities ever could.
At senior level especially, recruitment isn’t about skills because they’re a prerequisite at that point. It’s about chemistry, timing and motivation, and whether someone can lead a team through a difficult conversation without setting the building on fire. Good luck finding that in a key word search.
Here’s my favourite test: could I sit next to this person on a long-haul flight without wanting to throw myself out of the emergency exit? Unscientific, sure, but I’ve yet to find a spreadsheet or AI agent that can tell me whether someone’s going to be a good leader.
The people we hire shape businesses and their culture. We’re ultimately responsible for how everyone else feels at work, every day, and it’s not something we take lightly. That’s why face-to-face conversations still matter to me, and why I get defiant when people say technology will replace human judgement.
The best recruiters I know aren’t really in the recruitment business – we’re in the people business. The longer I do it, the less I care about placements and the more I care about people.
The real satisfaction doesn’t come from that initial buzz when you make the hire. It comes from checking in a year later and finding out they’re thriving in the team and really growing into a role.
Technology might be able to help us find people faster, organise information, and spot patterns, but choosing the right person has always been a human skill. After 30 years in this game, that’s the one thing I’m confident won’t change.
