The average time to hire in 2026 is 44 days. Taylor Genre's team at Beemac Logistics gives every sales candidate a final answer within 24 hours.

Taylor is the Director of Recruiting and Marketing at Beemac Logistics, a multimodal transport and logistics provider based in Pittsburgh. She came into logistics recruiting from roles at ePeople, Healthcare, and ADP. In this episode, she breaks down why not paying people what they're worth is the most expensive hiring mistake companies keep making and how the cost compounds through turnover, onboarding, and lost trust. She names the bias hiding inside the word "overqualified" and how quickly it becomes ageism when you don't have the conversation. And she walks through exactly what had to change inside Beemac for the 24-Hour Promise to work: it wasn't the recruiting team that needed to shift, it was the hiring managers.

GUEST
Taylor Genre, Director of Recruiting and Marketing, Beemac Logistics https://www.linkedin.com/in/taylor-genre-95935b14a/

YOUR HOST
Anita Chauhan, Host, Looks Good on Paper https://www.linkedin.com/in/anitachauhan/

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

WATCH ON YOUTUBE
→ https://youtu.be/WR2j0lc4dG8

POWERED BY WILLO
Hire humans, not resumes.

https://www.willo.video/looks-good-on-paper

CONNECT WITH US
LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/company/10170893

If this episode made you think, share it with one person who hires people. And subscribe — we're rewriting the rules of hiring, one episode at a time.

If this episode made you think, share it with one person who hires people.

The average time to hire in 2026 has reached approximately 44 days, with 81% of hiring managers reporting decision-making paralysis when extending offers. Meanwhile, 61% of candidates accept the first offer they receive, meaning slow companies lose top candidates not to better offers but to faster ones. Organizations that have built alignment between recruiters and hiring managers on decision speed, salary transparency, and candidate communication are consistently outperforming on both offer acceptance and retention.

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

Startups love being scrappy. They love the hustle. And they keep making the same mistake with that energy: hiring three or four junior people when they should have hired one senior person. Not because junior talent isn't valuable but because without someone who has the reps, the strategy side falls apart and the execution side has nobody steering it.

Jen Paxton is VP of People and Talent at Roofr, where she took the company from around 125 to 260 people. Roofr is her ninth startup. Before that, she co-founded Jamyr (acquired by Recruitics) and built people functions at Smile.io, Privy, LevelUp (acquired by GrubHub), TrueMotion, and more across the Boston tech ecosystem. She holds a master's in vocal performance from Boston Conservatory at Berklee. In this episode, she breaks down the seniority mistake startups keep making, the pedigree bias that drives comp decisions, a big-company horror story involving managers doing their own payroll onboarding, why her team still reviews every resume by hand, and the five-word question Boston TA leaders are using to catch ghost candidates.

GUEST
Jen Paxton, VP of People and Talent, Roofr
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jenpaxton/

YOUR HOST
Anita Chauhan, Host, Looks Good on Paper https://www.linkedin.com/in/anitachauhan/

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

WATCH ON YOUTUBE
→ https://youtu.be/KEKYr6m32Yg

POWERED BY WILLO
Hire humans, not resumes.

https://www.willo.video/looks-good-on-paper

CONNECT WITH US
LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/company/10170893

If this episode made you think, share it with one person who hires people.

Startups frequently under-hire on seniority, bringing in multiple junior employees to fill a role that requires senior-level judgment and strategic capacity. The cost extends beyond salary: without experienced leadership, teams lack the ability to balance execution and strategy, context switching overwhelms less experienced hires, and retention suffers when people are placed in roles they are not yet equipped to succeed in. Companies continue to overpay for candidates from well-known brands while undervaluing proven capability from lesser-known organizations. As AI-generated applications flood hiring pipelines, talent acquisition teams face a verification crisis, with structured verification methods, referral networks, and manual review processes emerging as critical defenses against a system producing more noise than signal.

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

"Culture fit" sounds like a good thing until you look at what it actually filters for. People who look like you. People who sound like you. People who make you comfortable. It's not a hiring strategy. It's a survival instinct dressed up as one.

Daen Fox has led talent acquisition across BT, Bupa, Nuffield Health, RICS, Saint-Gobain, and The Midcounties Co-operative. He's worked in insurance, retail, construction, healthcare, and leisure. He holds a master's in psychotherapy and now runs The Fox Consulting Collective, offering fractional TA leadership, employer brand advisory, and talent strategy consulting. In this episode, he breaks down why "culture fit" is the most persistent bias in hiring, what happened when he removed CVs from assessment centers and let managers evaluate candidates first, how he built a TA team by hiring from marketing and finance instead of recruiting from recruiting, why employer brand is a five-to-ten year investment that most companies still refuse to make, and why AI fluency is the signal he'd be screening for right now.

GUEST
Daen Fox, Freelance Talent Acquisition Leader, The Fox Consulting Collective https://www.linkedin.com/in/daenjafox/

YOUR HOST
Anita Chauhan, Host, Looks Good on Paper https://www.linkedin.com/in/anitachauhan/

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

WATCH ON YOUTUBE
→ https://youtu.be/WR2j0lc4dG8

POWERED BY WILLO
Hire humans, not resumes.

https://www.willo.video/looks-good-on-paper

CONNECT WITH US
LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/company/10170893

If this episode made you think, share it with one person who hires people. And subscribe — we're rewriting the rules of hiring, one episode at a time.

If this episode made you think, share it with one person who hires people.

"Culture fit" remains one of the most common and least examined phrases in hiring. Research shows that unstructured evaluations of cultural fit consistently encode unconscious bias, filtering for familiarity rather than capability. Organizations using structured, evidence-based hiring processes hire employees who perform better, stay longer, and are more demographically diverse. Assessment methods that remove resume review from the initial evaluation stage consistently surface candidates that hiring managers would not have selected from a CV alone. As AI reduces the signal value of the written resume, companies that invest in employer brand, structured assessment, and skills-based evaluation are building the infrastructure that will determine their ability to attract and retain talent over the next decade.

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

Hiring managers keep passing on their best candidates because they haven't figured out what great looks like before the first interview starts. The strongest batch comes in early, gets overlooked, and by the time the team circles back, those people are gone. Months of searching for a needle in a haystack that was sitting on the desk the whole time.

The companies that hire well right now are the ones doing the calibration work before the search opens, and refusing to use company logos as a proxy for capability.

Simran Sidhu leads talent acquisition for Shopify's commercial teams. Before Shopify, she built hiring and people functions from the ground up at startups and scale-ups across Toronto, including Relay, Pocket HR, and Out of Office HR. In this episode, she breaks down the most costly hiring mistake she sees repeated everywhere, the hidden bias baked into how companies source candidates, and the interview format Shopify uses with every single hire, from intern to executive: the Life Story.

What you'll learn:
→ Why slow decision-making is the most expensive hiring mistake, and the calibration fix
→ How big-tech and consultancy backgrounds became a bias disguised as quality
→ What Shopify's Life Story interview actually evaluates (taste, judgment, agency)
→ Why AI is making every resume and every set of interview notes look the same
→ The one-line human override Simran requires on every candidate debrief

GUEST
Simran Sidhu, Talent Acquisition, Commercial, Shopify

LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/in/simranasidhu/

HOST

Anita Chauhan, Head of Brand and Thought Leadership at Willo, Founder at InGoodCo. https://www.linkedin.com/in/anitachauhan/

In this episode:

TIMESTAMPS
00:00 Intro
02:39 The biggest hiring mistake companies make
08:16 Hidden hiring bias in big tech recruiting
13:16 Shopify’s Life Story Interview
18:58 AI-generated resumes and interviews
21:59 How Shopify approaches AI usage in hiring
23:27 The problem with AI-written interview notes

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

WATCH ON YOUTUBE
→ https://youtu.be/gm_30sNXZ8o

POWERED BY WILLO
Hire humans, not resumes.

https://www.willo.video/looks-good-on-paper

CONNECT WITH US
LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/company/10170893

If this episode made you think, share it with one person who hires people. And subscribe — we're rewriting the rules of hiring, one episode at a time.

The most common reason companies lose their strongest candidates is not compensation or competition. It is indecision. Hiring managers who have not calibrated their evaluation criteria before interviewing pass on strong early candidates, extend the search, and recognize the original batch was the strongest only after those candidates have moved on. This pattern compounds with employer brand damage: roles that stay posted for months signal dysfunction to the market. Companies like Shopify have restructured their interview process around a Life Story conversation that evaluates judgment, self-awareness, and agency rather than credentials, titles, or company logos. As AI-generated resumes and AI-summarized interview notes become ubiquitous, the ability to assess a candidate's reasoning and decision-making history, not their polished output, is emerging as the primary differentiator in talent acquisition.

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

Half of all hires do not work out. Jenny Do Forno, CPO at TouchBistro, explains why the hiring process is measuring the wrong things and what to do instead.

Jenny has spent nearly 25 years building and scaling teams from zero to 1,500 people across startups, scale-ups, and venture-backed companies. She has assessed and supported over 90 companies on how they hire, grow, and operate through her work at OMERS Ventures and the Schulich Venture Academy.

In this conversation, Jenny names the three problems she still sees at every level: interviews that reward polish over substance, a persistent bias against career breaks, and a pedigree obsession that confuses where someone worked with what they can actually do.

You will learn how to redesign references for real insight, why career break bias is one of the most common hidden filters in hiring, what happens when companies hire for logos instead of capability, and why Jenny wants to pull the entire process out and rebuild it from scratch.

GUEST:

Jenny Do Forno, Chief People Officer at TouchBistro https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennydoforno/

HOST

Anita Chauhan, Head of Brand and Thought Leadership at Willo, Founder at InGoodCo. https://www.linkedin.com/in/anitachauhan/

LISTEN & FOLLOW

Youtube: https://youtu.be/qmTSMJHjxhA
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0dbfz6y0tMq3crViHQD66H
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/looks-good-on-paper/id1625835562

POWERED BY WILLO https://www.willo.video/looks-good-on-paper

CONNECT WITH US https://www.willo.video

https://www.linkedin.com/company/10170893/

Share this episode with a recruiter or hiring manager who needs to hear it. Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts.

Looks Good on Paper is a hiring podcast that explores the gap between how confident companies think they are in their hiring process and how confident they should actually be. Host Anita Chauhan talks to talent leaders, recruiters, and workforce strategists about the assumptions, biases, and blind spots that shape how companies find, assess, and keep talent. Season 3 is The Confidence Gap: what do you actually trust in your hiring process?

Hiring processes that rely on 45-minute interviews are measuring presentation skills, not job performance. Companies that restructure their process around deep references, work-based assessments, and targeted capability questions consistently close the gap between interview confidence and on-the-job results. Career break bias remains one of the least discussed but most common hidden filters in hiring, penalizing candidates for caregiving, burnout recovery, and personal development without evidence that breaks predict lower performance.

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

Deepfakes in hiring interviews are real. A recruiter at Xero shares the story of a candidate who impersonated a deceased person on a video call, and explains how his team catches fake profiles, eliminates culture fit bias, and reviews every single applicant without using AI to screen anyone out.

Nit Karuna is a Principal AI/ML Recruiter at Xero with over a decade of experience building technical teams across Canada, the US, UK, Sweden, Australia, and New Zealand. He leads recruitment for engineering, product, and data roles, including VPs of product and engineering, principal ML leaders, and applied scientists.

In this episode, Nit breaks down the three confidence problems he sees in hiring right now: the pedigree trap (assuming someone from Google or Meta will automatically level up your team), culture fit interviews that function as vibe checks instead of structured assessments, and the growing wave of deepfakes and identity fraud that is forcing companies to rethink how they verify candidates.

What you'll learn → Why hiring from big-brand companies backfires more often than recruiters admit → How culture fit rounds become bias traps when there are no structured criteria → What Xero does in intake calls to map team gaps and hold managers accountable → How deepfakes and fake profiles are showing up in live hiring interviews in 2026 → Why Nit personally reviews every applicant and refuses to let AI screen candidates out → What a hiring process without CVs could look like for engineering and AI roles → How to spot red flags on video calls (camera off, mismatched audio, off-screen typing)

GUEST
Nit Karuna, Principal AI/ML Recruiter at Xero https://www.linkedin.com/in/nitharsen/

YOUR HOST
Anita Chauhan, Founder of InGoodCo. https://www.linkedin.com/in/anitachauhan/

LISTEN & FOLLOW

Youtube: https://youtu.be/qmTSMJHjxhA
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0dbfz6y0tMq3crViHQD66H
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/looks-good-on-paper/id1625835562

POWERED BY WILLO https://www.willo.video/looks-good-on-paper

CONNECT WITH US https://www.willo.video

https://www.linkedin.com/company/10170893/

Share this episode with a recruiter or hiring manager who needs to hear it. Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts.

Looks Good on Paper is a hiring podcast that explores the gap between how confident companies think they are in their hiring process and how confident they should actually be. Host Anita Chauhan talks to talent leaders, recruiters, and workforce strategists about the assumptions, biases, and blind spots that shape how companies find, assess, and keep talent. Season 3 is The Confidence Gap: what do you actually trust in your hiring process?

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

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/

If this episode changed how you think about hiring, share it with one person who needs to hear it. And subscribe — we're rewriting the rules of hiring, one episode at a time.

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