How can I tell if someone will be good at the job before I hire them?

Look at a pile of CVs and know who'll work well in your team.

Kit has a real conversation with every applicant. Across one job, that can be 400,000 words about who these people are. A CV gives you a page.

Structured conversations predict performance much better than unstructured ones.

Structured interviews (same questions, same scoring) predict job performance at about .42. Unstructured interviews manage about .19 (Sackett and others, 2022). Every Kit call is structured around the same scorecard for the role.

The things a CV shows best predict least.

Years of experience barely predict performance (.06) and don't predict who stays at all (.00). Grades are weak too (.21 for performance, slightly negative for staying) (Van Iddekinge and others, 2019).

High-impact people become visible before interview.

The usual process narrows the pool on the thinnest information, at the start, and only gathers rich information (interviews) on the few who survive. The people cut at the CV stage never get the conversation that would have shown what they could do.

Kit turns it the right way round. Everyone gets the conversation first. Then the shortlist is built on the rich information, and interviews go to the people most likely to have impact.

Why the top of the pool is worth finding.

• Performance isn't a bell curve. Across hundreds of samples of people at work, a normal bell curve fitted only 4.8% of them. Most show a long tail: a small number of people produce a large share of results (Joo, Aguinis and Bradley, 2017).
• The gap is widest in complex jobs. In high-complexity jobs, the spread of output between people is about 48% of average output, against 19% in simple jobs (Hunter, Schmidt and Judiesch, 1990).

In professional roles, the difference between a good hire and a great one is large, and the great one is often not the best-looking CV.

The CV said 100th. Kit said first. She got the job.

About 200 applicants. The applicant tracking system marked one applicant as missing two of the five criteria. Rhaelm's hiring lead guessed she was "about the 100th CV down the list". Her CV read: "medical transcriber, data cleanser... how's that relevant". Kit rated her around 90%. In conversation she described running the show for a Lloyd's of London business. She was hired.

Rhaelm's hiring lead also met fewer people: "I probably had to at least speak to five or six, whereas actually I've spoken to three."