We Hire the CV. We Work With the Behaviour.

Most of us who have spent years in organisations carry a particular memory. A hiring meeting where everyone agreed. The CV was strong, the experience was right, the interviews went well. There was a sense of relief in the room: we had found the person.

And then, some months later, a different conversation. Not about competence. Nobody doubts that the person can do the work. The conversation is quieter and harder to name. Something isn't settling. The team feels it. The person feels it, perhaps most of all.

I have sat in both of those rooms more times than I can count. For a long while I treated the second conversation as bad luck, or a misjudgement somewhere along the way. Over the years I stopped believing that. Nobody in that first room made a mistake. We measured what we know how to measure.

What we know how to measure

We are good at assessing what a person knows and what they have done. Qualifications, experience, skills, competencies. We have frameworks for all of it, and they matter. I would never argue otherwise. Skill sets the floor. Without it, nothing else follows.

But skill tells us whether someone can do the job. It says very little about how they will do it: how they decide when information is incomplete, how they work with people who see things differently, what they reach for when the pressure arrives. That is behaviour. And behaviour, more often than skill, is what separates the people who flourish from the people who struggle.

Skill gets people in. Behaviour decides how far they go.

Two signatures, not one

Here is the part I think we most often miss. Behaviour has two sides, and we usually look at only one of them, if we look at all.

The first belongs to the person. Every one of us carries an ingrained way of working. It was formed long before we joined any organisation, and it does not change because a job description asks it to. Some of us weigh everything before committing; others move first and correct along the way. Some of us do our best thinking in a room full of people; others need quiet and ownership. None of these is right or wrong. They are simply who we are at work.

The second belongs to the organisation. Every organisation behaves in its own way too. It has patterns it rewards, patterns it tolerates and patterns it quietly discourages. These are rarely written down. They are not the values on the wall. But anyone who has worked somewhere for a few months can feel them.

When these two signatures meet well, and skill and competency support the meeting, something good happens. A person contributes to the full potential they carry. When they don't meet, even very capable people spend a great deal of their energy working against the grain. From the outside it can look like underperformance. From the inside it feels like swimming upstream every single day.

Why the interview cannot see it

If behaviour matters this much, why do we miss it so often? I think there are three honest reasons.

The first is language. We describe behaviour in adjectives: dynamic, collaborative, a go-getter, a team player. Each interviewer means something slightly different by each word, and none of them can be checked.

The second is that organisations describe themselves in aspiration. Ask a leadership team how their organisation behaves and you will usually hear what they hope it is. That is natural, and it is human. But it means the candidate is being compared to a picture that does not quite exist.

The third is that the interview meets a prepared person on a good day. This is especially true of senior leaders, who are skilled communicators. We see how well they present. We rarely see how they decide when the room goes quiet and the numbers are going the wrong way.

You meet a leader in the interview. You discover them under pressure.

Not a verdict, a way of seeing

I want to be careful here, because this kind of thinking can easily turn into labelling people, and that is the opposite of what I believe. Behaviour is not a scorecard. A person who struggles in one setting may thrive in another, with no change in who they are. The point of understanding behaviour is not to judge anyone. It is to see more clearly, and then let the people who know the role make the decision with their eyes open.

That is the thought behind SignatureIQ. It reads behaviour descriptively and clearly, for the leader, for the organisation and for the individual. It does not say hire or reject. It decodes behaviour; the organisation decides.

Three questions worth sitting with

If any of this rings true, I would offer three questions to anyone who makes decisions about people. Not as a checklist, but as something to sit with for a while.

1. Do we actually know how our organisation behaves today, as opposed to how we describe it?
2. When we say a candidate "fits", what exactly do we mean, and would everyone in the room define it the same way?
3. In our interviews, are we seeing a person's behaviour, or a performance of it?

I don't think any of us will ever take the uncertainty out of decisions about people, nor should we try. People are not equations. But I do believe we can see them, and our own organisations, a little more honestly than we do today.

When we understand how someone naturally works, we stop asking them to become someone else. And that, I have come to believe, is where real contribution begins.