Twenty-five years in executive search, at Korn Ferry, Randstad and ABC Consultants — and, at Zee Entertainment, on the other side of the table, hiring into a business rather than for a client. Several hundred candidates interviewed and assessed, across functions and across levels, for people who were paying a great deal of money to get the decision right.
Two of those are among the largest search and staffing firms in the world; one is the oldest in India. Between them they use every screening method the industry has. All of them still come down to a person asking questions and forming a view.
In that work you learn something that does not show up in any CV screening tool. The document tells you almost nothing. Two people submit near-identical CVs — same title, same sector, same years — and one of them, twenty minutes into a conversation, is plainly the stronger candidate. Nothing on the page predicted it. The difference only appeared once someone asked the right question and listened properly to the answer.
That is what a good search consultant is actually paid for. Not the shortlist — the judgement about which question to ask, and what an answer really tells you.
The trouble is that this judgement only ever reached a handful of people. A retained search covers a few candidates for one role at one company. Everyone else — the overwhelming majority — gets filtered by keyword and never speaks to anyone at all.