Don’t hire the résumé. Hire the person.
Steven Bartlett. Photo: Getty Images
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Steven Bartlett takes the main stage at the Inc. 5000 Conference in Dallas this week. But one of his greatest leadership lessons didn’t happen under the spotlight. It came from a hire most founders wouldn’t have chosen.
“I hired someone whose CV was two lines. Their experience was zero,” Bartlett, the founder and CEO of Steven.com and host of The Diary of a CEO, wrote on LinkedIn earlier this year. In the same post, he wrote that six months into the job, she was “one of the best hires I had ever made.”
On paper, the majority of employers have moved past the resume. According to NACE’s Job Outlook 2026 survey, 70 percent of them use skills-based hiring for entry-level roles, an increase from 65 percent a year prior. Bartlett went one step further, and it paid in dividends. His experience shows that a great candidate is more than a one-dimensional scorecard.
What Bartlett saw in the candidate
Bartlett wrote that much of the reason he gave her the job came down to a handful of moments. Three stand out.
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First, she thanked the security guard by name on the way into the building. She proved her character before the interview even began.
Second, she was honest about her knowledge gaps. When she wasn’t familiar with something in the interview, she didn’t pretend to have all the answers.
According to Bartlett, she told him, “I don’t know that yet, but here’s how I’d figure it out.”