The Experience You Take for Granted

By Gavin Traylor, Founder of Hike

“I don’t really brag on myself a lot.”

A man I had been working with said this while we talked about his career in sales. Then he described how he had helped his team.

Their customer system required people to keep returning to previous conversations to work out who to contact next. He trained his colleagues to use it more efficiently, then created a workflow that prompted them to add the next contact as they completed the current one.

I asked what difference it had made. He told me the team could contact almost twice as many clients each day.

It amazed me how close this part of his experience had come to being left out.

Sales was his job title. His account showed someone who had noticed a problem, understood a system well enough to improve it and helped other people work more effectively. For a business that needed those things, this could be the most relevant part of his experience.

Because the work was familiar to him, it had not felt important enough to explain.

A CV can hide someone even when it is full of achievements.

And frankly, the system surrounding it has gone entirely mad. We have built a recruitment machine that actively punishes human nuance. Organisations spend millions on automated screening and AI filtering tools that essentially optimise for buzzword density. This mechanically penalises the exact creative thinkers who solve non linear problems, simply because they do not format their lives like a keyword database. It is absolute insanity, and it leaves good people shouting into a vacuum.

Another person I worked with had reached the point where even an automatic rejection offered a little comfort. At least it meant her application had arrived somewhere.

“The silence was a bit loud, like very, very loud,” she told me.

She kept revising her CV, applying and trying again. Her results were visible but her contribution was harder to see.

We went back through her experience together. What had been happening before each result? What had made the work difficult? What had she noticed? What had she done when other people were unconvinced?

One account involved businesses whose owners were approaching retirement without anyone ready to take over. She had helped develop a programme to prepare people for that responsibility. Colleagues doubted it would attract interest, so she positioned it as an investment in people and in the future of those businesses. Sales colleagues began promoting it and bringing participants to her.

The result mattered but the route to it revealed far more. She had recognised a business risk, understood why people were hesitant and found a way to bring them with her.

She later told me that working through accounts like this helped her speak about her experience with more confidence in interviews. She could choose examples that showed what she was good at and the work she wanted to do more of.

Her search was still continuing, but she could give an employer a fuller account of what she had already done.

These are two different people, doing different kinds of work. In both cases, their experience had been compressed until much of their contribution had disappeared.

A job title tells us the role someone held but it’s a result that tells us what happened. Neither, by itself, tells us how that person thinks, what they noticed or what they did when the answer was not obvious.

That gap between what is written and what is real is where I have spent much of my career.

My headhunting work has included helping Western Union, Monzo, Eight Roads, Wise and Meta make senior appointments. Those decisions depended on understanding both the organisation and the person.

What did the business need to achieve? What had this person done that might matter here? What motivated them? In which conditions could they do their best work?

Often, the connection emerged because we stayed with a question a little longer.

That is why I am building Hike.

We see the possibility in people. We are building technology that helps people and employers see it too, ditching mechanical buzzword filters for genuine understanding.

Hike explores someone’s experience through thoughtful questions: what happened, what they personally did, how they approached it and what difference they made. They can confirm or correct the account, so it represents their experience accurately.

For employers, that means a clearer picture of what an applicant could contribute, grounded in examples that relate to the work they need done. For people, it means recognising what their experience demonstrates and exploring where it could take them next.

I want Hike to stay useful throughout a person’s working life, helping them learn from each chapter and make more informed choices about the next one. I want organisations to recognise and develop that possibility within their teams too.

I am building Hike in Manchester with a simple aim: make every hiring decision smarter than the last, and help more people shape a working life they love.

When I spoke again with the man from the beginning of this story, he was still looking for a role. The search was difficult. He wanted work he could feel good about and stay in for the long term.

He was also exploring roles he had not previously known to look for. He had found a clearer way to describe what connected the different parts of his experience.

“What I ultimately do is solve problems.”

These are two separate accounts from my work with Hike users. Names and identifying details have been omitted.

Hiring for a live role? Message me about a free Hike trial with your existing applicants.

Exploring your next move? Visit byhike.com.