People don't want to be assessed. They want to be understood

Almost everything written about hiring begins from the company’s point of view. How to attract candidates, how to screen and interview them, and how to make better hiring decisions. The candidate appears mainly as something to optimise. But the best hiring processes don’t work because they’re better at evaluating people; they work because they’re better at understanding them.

Those sound similar, but they’re very different ideas. Most hiring asks people to perform.

Write the perfect CV, answer the right questions, impress the interviewer, demonstrate confidence and avoid anything they aren’t looking for. The process rewards people who become good at interviews, then quietly mistakes interview performance for how they’ll actually work. People aren’t trying to perform. They’re just trying to be understood.

They want someone to see how they think, the environments they thrive in, the work that brings out their best and the kinds of teams where they’ll genuinely succeed. They also want to understand the company in return, because a hiring decision is one of the few decisions both sides make at exactly the same time.

Understanding has to go both ways, so the candidate gets a read of their own, not just the company. The company learns how someone is likely to contribute. The candidate walks away with a genuine read of how they work and where they’re at their best, theirs to keep whether the answer is yes or no. Almost no hiring process leaves a person better off for having been through it. This one does.

Hiring shouldn’t be one side learning about the other. It should be two sides understanding each other, in a shared conversation that ends in a decision both can believe in.