The Person AI Should Help Us See

By Gavin Traylor

A candidate sees the CV they have worked hard to get right. A hiring manager sees it alongside hundreds of others. In conversations I am having with employers, some describe finding the same sentences across applications from different people.

Easy Apply makes sending another application simple. Generic AI tools make rewriting it easier. When the same tools and familiar prompts shape those applications, very different careers can end up sounding alike. For someone receiving little response, doing both can feel like the sensible next step. Yet the employers I speak to describe having plenty of applications and still struggling to understand who could do the work.

This is the hiring problem that interests me: all that activity can leave both sides knowing very little about each other. The opportunity is to use technology to bring out the experience that helps them make a better decision.

Anna is one of a number of users we’re helping through Hike. She had rewritten her CV dozens of times and was getting little response. Her original CV already contained achievements. We began exploring the work behind them: what had been difficult, what she had decided, who else had contributed and what she had personally done.

One example concerned moving agency workers into permanent employment. Managers preferred the existing arrangement because it spared them recruitment and administration. Anna designed a route that allowed them to nominate reliable people after six months of working together. They could keep people they trusted without starting a fresh recruitment process.

That detail explained how she had made a change workable for the people involved. For an employer seeking someone to introduce change, it offered something concrete to explore.

I used Hike’s platform to turn those examples into a CV grounded in her own experience. Its AI process is built around the questions I’ve developed through years of headhunting, connecting a person’s decisions, actions and results to what a particular role needs.

During the process, Anna wrote: “I'm noticing a consistent theme across my experience around project design and execution.” She later told me that reconstructing these examples helped her prepare for interviews. She could focus on her strongest experience and explain how she had achieved things, with greater confidence.

Alongside the revised CV, we worked on her applications and interview preparation. She secured a screening call and progressed to a final presentation round. She did not get the role, and her search continued.

In more than twenty years in recruitment, much of it headhunting, I have worked to connect what an employer needs with what someone could bring. That requires understanding both sides. A person's most relevant contribution can be difficult to recognise from their job title or a polished summary alone.

That is the approach we use at Hike: understand what a role needs, ask questions that draw out relevant experience, and help the candidate explain it in their application. The aim is to give employers useful evidence at the first decision, when they choose whom to meet.

Anna is one example of the progress we’re seeing across a number of Hike users: clearer applications, greater confidence and progress through interviews. This is what putting the person back into hiring looks like in practice: helping someone recognise what they could bring, and helping an employer see it too.

The candidate's name has been changed and identifying details omitted.