Why hiring plans fail, with Leo Harrison of Chapter 2

Workforce planning, hiring capacity and the end of the CV, with Leo Harrison, founder and CEO of Chapter 2.

Most hiring plans are modelled around the talent team. The funnel gets loaded, capacity gets mapped, monthly targets get set, and the plan looks completely achievable. Leo Harrison's view is that this is where recruitment quietly breaks, because a talent partner only runs one or two stages of an interview process and nobody checks whether the hiring managers, department leads and executives sitting in every other stage have the hours. Before he assesses any workforce plan he asks leaders a single question: has your team got 50 hours spare to do interviews? The answer is almost always no.

Leo spent more than 15 years at Oliver as global COO, helping scale the agency from four people to thousands of people across 40 countries. Recruitment was the hardest and most expensive problem the business had, so he left to solve it. Chapter 2, the embedded talent business he founded, now hires across six countries for brands including Unilever, KPMG, Wayfair and Bumble, and has appeared on the Sunday Times Fast Track 100 three years running. Chapter 2 also works inside Stephen Bartlett's ecosystem, using The Culture Test with clients.

In this episode Leo covers the capacity problem and how to fix it without new technology, why the talent team should be working inside the hiring manager's own network rather than beside it, and the bias he thinks progressive companies still miss. Technical hiring assesses capability relentlessly, he argues, and assesses cultural alignment almost never, which is how teams end up with people who can do the work and damage the output of everyone around them. He is also unusually honest about his own bias, describing himself as bad at recruitment because he hires people he likes, and explaining the advice a former boss gave him about hiring someone he did not naturally get on with.

On CVs, Leo is blunt. He thinks they should have disappeared years ago. He asks for a LinkedIn profile instead, then goes straight past the profile to what the person engages with, comments on and reacts to, because that tells him more than any employment history. He also describes the product Chapter 2 is building to pull candidate profiles from more than 60 sources without relying on LinkedIn at all, on the argument that the strongest engineers have neither a polished profile nor a CV.

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
Leo Harrison, Founder and CEO, Chapter 2
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/leoharrison1/
Chapter 2: https://www.chapter2.group/meet-chapter-2

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Anita Chauhan, Founder, InGoodCo., Brand and Thoughtleadership @Willo
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anitachauhan/

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If this one landed with someone on your hiring team, send it to them. Follow Looks Good on Paper wherever you listen so you get every Season 4 conversation.

Looks Good on Paper is a podcast about hiring, hosted by Anita Chauhan and powered by Willo. In this episode, Leo Harrison, founder and CEO of the embedded talent business Chapter 2, explains why most workforce plans fail on interview capacity rather than candidate supply, why cultural alignment is the bias that survives in companies who believe they have addressed bias, and what he thinks replaces the CV. Season 4 asks what a CV leaves out, on both sides of the hiring table.

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