Hiring for potential, not perfection, with Daniel Hackett of Amazon

Military hiring, alternative talent pipelines and candidate-led recruitment, with Daniel Hackett of Amazon.

Most hiring starts with the business. What does the team need, what skills are on the job description, what does the ideal candidate look like. Daniel Hackett thinks that is the biggest mistake companies keep making. As a military recruiter leading military and police hiring across Europe for Amazon, he works the other way round. His team talks to service leavers, veterans, reservists and military spouses first, finds out what they are good at and what they enjoy, and then finds the role in Amazon that fits. He describes the team as an internal agency whose real priority is the candidate, and he argues that what a hiring team says it wants is often not what it needs.

That approach has a commercial logic he makes plainly. When a recruiter has spent hours with a candidate rather than ten minutes, the hiring team doesn't need ten rounds of interviews. It sees one or two prepared candidates, and one of them is likely to get the job, instead of the business spending hundreds of hours interviewing to hire one person. And the time invested in candidates who don't get the role is rarely wasted. Daniel has seen candidates come back six, twelve or eighteen months later and be hired.

The hidden bias he names is against alternative backgrounds: military, police, fire and rescue, prison services, healthcare, former professional athletes. Hiring managers look at an infantry officer and struggle to picture them in operations, when planning, process, giving and receiving orders and leading people are their bread and butter. His instruction to hiring managers is to look for potential rather than perfection, because nobody arrives as a perfect Amazon candidate. The company-specific knowledge can be taught in the first six months. He also describes military spouses as one of the hardest pipelines, since they move every three to four years, and explains how Amazon can relocate them internally or make their role virtual.

Asked what hiring without CVs would look like, he answers in one word: nirvana. Many of his candidates haven't interviewed in more than 30 years and have never needed to write a CV, which he says is not their fault. As a dyslexic thinker, he knows the problem personally. He can talk through his experience in an interview, but getting a great CV out of his head and onto paper is where he gets stuck, and a screening process that filters on that is not inclusive.

For teams that feel they have exhausted their talent pool, his advice is practical. Go to the events where these communities are, message people on LinkedIn, and have twenty-minute conversations with someone in the fire service or the NHS even when you are not hiring. Amazon doesn't own this gold mine, he says. Anyone can open it.

Looks Good on Paper is hosted by Anita Chauhan and powered by Willo. Season 4 is about everything the document leaves out, on both sides of the hiring table.

Guest: Daniel Hackett, Military Recruiter, Amazon
Host: Anita Chauhan, Founder, InGoodCo.
Willo: https://www.willo.video/looks-good-on-paper

Show Resources

• Willo: willo.video - The most cost-effective way to screen candidates at scale. Interview candidates anywhere & at any time
• CV Free Toolkit: cvfree.me/join - Break up with the CV and get everything you need to modernize your hiring approach with skills-based assessments
• Anita Chauhan: linkedin.com/in/anitachauhan - Connect with the host