Most hiring decisions get made on a feeling. A hiring manager comes out of an interview, says "I think this one is a better fit," and the team moves forward. Anu Joshi has spent 17 years inside talent functions watching that pattern play out, and she has a problem with it. Interviews are high-pressure performance environments. The candidates who do well are often the ones who can read the room and tell you what you want to hear. The ones who freeze are not necessarily worse at the job. They are worse at the interview.

Those are different things, and most teams are confusing them. Anu is currently Director of Talent at FutureSight, where she leads executive and leadership hiring for early-stage B2B AI companies. In this episode she walks through the biggest hiring mistakes she sees teams keep making, the bias she would eliminate first if she could pick only one, and what hiring actually looks like when you decenter the CV. She also gets specific about a recent founding engineer search where the team replaced the front of the funnel with a work sample and a short video walkthrough, and the candidate they hired told them the process felt like a real conversation about real work instead of a performance.

What you'll learn:

→ Why making hiring decisions on gut feeling out of an interview is the biggest mistake companies keep making
→ How bias against non-linear career trajectories quietly costs companies their best candidates
→ What it actually looks like to decenter the CV in a real founding engineer search
→ Why AI in hiring is not about losing jobs but about roles getting redefined, and what talent leaders need to do about it

GUEST
Anu Joshi, Director of Talent at FutureSight — LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/in/anu-joshi-sphri%E2%84%A2-46988a12/

YOUR HOST
Anita Chauhan — LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/in/anitachauhan/

LISTEN & FOLLOW
Spotify → https://open.spotify.com/show/0dbfz6y0tMq3crViHQD66H
Apple Podcasts → https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/looks-good-on-paper/id1625835562
All episodes → https://looksgoodonpaper.buzzsprout.com/

POWERED BY WILLO
Hire humans, not resumes → https://www.willo.video/looks-good-on-paper
LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/company/10170893/

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The person who performs best in an interview is not always the person who performs best in the job. Most hiring teams are still rewarding interview performance instead of skill, making decisions based on gut feeling rather than structured competency frameworks built from the actual gap they're trying to fill. Bias against non-linear career trajectories, including shorter tenures and career breaks for caregiving or burnout, is one of the most common hidden biases in modern hiring and is quietly costing companies their best candidates. Decentering the CV in favour of work samples and short async video walkthroughs is emerging as a more reliable signal of fit than resume review, particularly in early-stage and venture studio hiring where the gap between credential and capability is widest.

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