A star on the CV who couldn't string two words together.
Complete fiasco yesterday. Great candidate on paper: every technology the client wanted, even a bit of the rare commercial AI experience they were hoping for. We had spoken before. He had sent a short video. And on the final call he could not string two words together, with a CV that was beautiful and experience that was dead-on for the industry.
I want to sit with that for a moment instead of rushing past it, because everything about the modern hiring pipeline said this person was a match. The document was flawless. The keywords lined up with the client's stack item for item. If matching CVs to job specs were the job, this placement closes itself. The CV is a marketing document, and the market has gotten very good at writing them. What the paper cannot carry is the thing the final call exists to find: whether the person can think out loud, in front of a stranger, about the work they claim to have done. Yesterday the answer was no, and no amount of paper survives that.
The deeper trap is the senior label, because at least the beautiful CV fails loudly. The label fails quietly. A bank stamps someone senior: works as a senior right now, has mentoring experience, the title is real and verifiable. Then the technical screen starts, and the most common answer to concrete questions is "I don't remember, I'd have to look that up, haven't touched it in a while." Not once, but as a pattern, technology by technology, across the exact stack the title is supposed to certify. You grade them junior if you are generous. And when the screening feedback comes back that detailed, item by item, with what was asked and what came back, there is nothing to argue with. The title said one thing. The screen said another. The screen wins, because the title was awarded by an organization with its own reasons, and the screen was run by someone who reads code for a living.
There is a second failure mode that is worse, and it sits on the buyer's side of the table. Some interviewers will never pass anyone. Not because the candidates are weak, but because the interviewer cannot accept that someone might be more skilled than they are, and the interview quietly becomes a defense of their own standing. Every candidate is too junior, too narrow, too something. That is a disaster for the company doing the hiring, and it is invisible from inside: the process looks rigorous, the bar looks high, and the pipeline produces nothing but rejections while the work waits. A vetting process has to screen the candidate, but somebody also has to notice when the filter itself is the broken part.
All of this is why we run the process we run. We prescreen, and we ask for the short video, precisely so the live call is not where reality first shows up. The prescreen catches the label that does not match the skills. The video catches the person who cannot communicate before a client's calendar gets spent on finding that out. Layers, in order, each one cheap to run and expensive to skip.
And I know they are expensive to skip because we skipped them, exactly once. The week we dropped the prescreen to move fast, the guy sat there being rude to the client. Live, on the call that carries our name. That is the trade you make when you cut vetting for speed: you save days on the calendar and spend them from your reputation, at an exchange rate you do not get to choose. We put the step back and it has not moved since.
Yesterday still stings, but the system worked the way layers are supposed to work: the fiasco happened in our process, not in the client's team, and the client will never meet that candidate. That is what vetting is actually for. Not producing perfect people, there are none, but making sure reality shows up in front of us before it shows up in front of you. The CV is the easy part. The person is the whole job.