A World Focused on the Wrong Criteria, and Tools

This is a one chapter preview from Hire the Right W.H.O.M.: How to Build High Performing Teams With Work-Ethic, Heart, Optimism, and Maturity.

It’s 1482. A restless genius named Leonardo da Vinci sits in his modest Florentine workshop, surrounded by his intricate sketches—war machines, architectural marvels, anatomical studies. But on this day, Leonardo is not sketching or sculpting. He’s selling.

Word has reached him that Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan, is searching for talent to fortify his city’s defenses. Leonardo knows he’s the man for the job. So he does something radical. He puts down his brush and picks up a quill.

What he creates is unprecedented—a letter, yes, but more than that: a strategic pitch, a story of innovation, ambition, and capability. He details not just his talents in painting or sculpture, but his military inventions, bridge designs, and hydraulic engineering ideas. It’s bold.

It’s visionary. And it becomes the first known resume in history.

Leonardo understood a truth that remains unchanged: it’s not just what you can do—it’s how you communicate your value. But somewhere along the way, we twisted his insight into a one-dimensional tool that captures criteria that is no longer relevant: the modern curriculum vitae. Of course we have modernized recruiting in other ways, including ideal candidate profiles (ICPs), employer branding efforts, referral programs, psychometric testing, and structured and unstructured interviewing, either one on one or in panels.

But the process all begins with the resume.

Five centuries later, Leonardo’s innovation has become a professional staple. Every job seeker crafts one. Every employer expects one. The resume was meant to distill value. Instead, it often distorts it.

Yes, resumes bring structure to hiring. They offer a way to sift through hundreds of applicants. But here’s the paradox: they simplify what should be scrutinized and obscure what should be seen clearly.

Resumés reduce human potential into bullet points. They elevate formatting over character. They encourage polish over honesty. They’ve become performance art—a carefully curated advertisement masquerading as truth.

And let’s be honest: resumes lie.

Why Resumes Lie

Think about it. Would you trust a commercial’s claims about a product without third-party validation? Of course not. So why do we accept resumes at face value?

The truth is, most candidates are incentivized to present themselves in the best possible light—and sometimes, to outright manipulate. Studies show that eighty-one percent of job seekers stretch the truth in interviews. Resumes are often exaggerations, omissions, and carefully constructed illusions.

And yet, this is the foundation of our hiring process? Make it make sense.

Relying on resumes alone turns hiring into a guessing game, where one side hides the truth and the other tries to uncover it—usually under time pressure and bias. The result?

Bad hires. Costly exits. Damaged teams.

In fact, recent research reveals that five out of six hiring managers say resume-based candidate pools routinely fail to match job requirements. Which begs the question:

Has the resume outlived its usefulness?

The Myth of More: Volume ≠ Value

We’ve been led to believe that successful hiring is a numbers game. That if we just gather enough resumes, keep the pipeline full, and crank through enough interviews, the right person will eventually rise to the top. This mindset is deeply embedded in modern recruitment systems. More applicants. More options. More chances to get it right.

But this is a myth. And a costly one.

More resumes don’t bring better hires. They bring more noise. They consume time, drain attention, and flood decision-making with surface-level data. It becomes harder to see clearly when you’re staring at page after page of job titles, degrees, and buzzwords. The illusion of choice makes us feel like we’re in control, when in fact, we’re just distracted.

The truth is, effective hiring is all about alignment, not volume. And alignment doesn’t come packaged in a pedigree. It doesn’t shine through a logo at the top of a CV. It can’t be found in years of experience alone.

It lives in behavior.

It shows itself in how a person approaches challenges, how they take responsibility, how they communicate under pressure, and how they recover from failure. It’s visible in their curiosity, in their humility, and in the quiet ways they make the team better. These are the human traits that consistently correlate with long-term success in any role.

But most hiring systems aren’t designed to detect these qualities.

Applicant tracking software can’t recognize grit or grace. Resumes don’t reveal how a person thinks or collaborates. And interviews that rely too heavily on credentials or past experience miss the opportunity to assess what truly matters.

Pedigree and Experience Lie, Too

There’s a long-standing belief in the corporate world that certain names carry weight. Certain schools. Certain companies. Certain titles. It’s the prestige effect—the idea that if someone graduated from a top-tier university or held a high-ranking role at a big-name firm, then they must be high potential. We assume excellence because of association. We trust the resume because we trust the brand names printed on it.

But the illusion doesn’t hold up under pressure.

If pedigree were a reliable predictor of performance, then every company stacked with Ivy League graduates would be thriving at the highest level. Every organization boasting a team of former big tech or blue-chip alumni would be unbeatable. But that’s not the case. In fact, some of the best- performing teams are led by people who didn’t follow the prestige path at all.

They didn’t attend the most celebrated institutions. They didn’t climb the ladder through the most recognizable companies. And yet, they outperform, over-deliver, and outlast.

Why? Because pedigree does not predict the right-fit or results.

It tells you where someone came from, not of what they’re capable. It reflects opportunity, access, and often privilege— not grit, adaptability, or leadership. Pedigree may open doors, but it doesn’t guarantee what happens once someone walks through them. It cannot tell you how someone will respond under pressure, or whether they’ll lift others around them, or if they’ll grow into the next level of challenge.

In many cases, it simply tells you they were good at playing the early game. It doesn’t say whether they can win the one you’re playing now.

The same distortion applies to experience. We treat past titles like proof. We assume that

if someone succeeded somewhere else, they’ll succeed here. But context changes everything.

A person’s performance is never built in isolation. It is shaped by the environment they were in, the leadership they received, and the culture they operated within. The variables matter. The fit matters.

Success in one ecosystem doesn’t automatically translate to another. Gallup has been clear on this point. Seventy percent of employee engagement is influenced by the direct manager. That means even top performers in one setting may falter in another if the leadership dynamic shifts.

It means what we often describe as individual brilliance is, more accurately, the result of a supportive, empowering, or well-aligned environment. And that environment may no longer exist when that individual joins your team.

We have to stop confusing the optics of a resume with the substance of a contribution.

We have to stop rewarding what looks good on paper if it doesn’t translate into meaningful value in practice. Because while pedigree and previous experience may offer the illusion of certainty, it’s behavior that tells the truth.

How someone shows up. How they solve problems. How they lead, learn, and grow in real time. That’s what matters. Not the logo beside their degree. Not the name of their former employer. Not the shimmer of a perfectly polished resume.

Real potential doesn’t shine. It shows up.

Unfortunately, Managers Lie, Too

Now let’s flip the lens.

It’s easy to scrutinize the flaws in external hiring—the resume inflation, the keyword stuffing, the bias of pedigree— but what happens when the evaluation process turns inward? When we shift from hiring strangers to promoting our own? That’s when the mirror gets uncomfortable.

Inside the organization, where resumes play a lesser role, decisions about advancement are supposed to come from lived experience. After all, these are people we know. We’ve seen them operate, collaborate, and contribute. We should be able to make better choices here. But strangely, we often don’t. Because even when all the evidence is right in front of us, bias still reigns.

Stretch assignments and promotions are rarely the product of dispassionate analysis or objective review. More often, they are the reward for recent visibility, for loyalty, for political favor. Managers make judgments not just based on merit, but on momentum.

They champion those who are close to them, those who make them look good, those who play the game well. They advocate with enthusiasm, sometimes with exaggeration. And in doing so, they cross the subtle line from truth-telling to storytelling.

It’s not always dishonest in the traditional sense. It’s often unconscious. A manager wants to see their protégé succeed. They want their team to be represented. They want their instincts on talent to be validated. So they promote with conviction, even if their conviction is based on a partial view. They speak confidently about someone’s readiness, not because the evidence is conclusive, but because the relationship feels strong. They remember the best moments and overlook the rest. They fill in the gaps with assumption. They lobby, they pitch, they sell.

In that moment, they are no longer evaluating talent. They are marketing it.

And just like that, the system loses clarity. When candidates are incentivized to perform, to impress, to signal competence rather than demonstrate it, and when managers are incentivized to advocate, to embellish, to position their people in the best light, truth becomes negotiable. Performance becomes subjective. Leadership potential becomes a story we tell, not a standard we measure.

What’s dangerous is not just the individual distortion, but the collective one. Because when enough of these decisions are made this way, an entire organization begins to mistake perception for proof. Bias becomes systemic. And talent decisions start serving politics instead of performance.

This is the reality of internal advancement when integrity takes a back seat to influence.

Managers, even well-intentioned ones, introduce noise into the process. Not because they’re bad leaders, but because they’re human. They want to believe in the people they’ve invested in. They want to see their favorites win. But belief without evidence is not evaluation— it’s projection.

And projection, in any talent system, is a dangerous substitute for truth.

The Right Criteria

Breakthroughs don’t begin in comfort zones. They erupt when the world insists a problem has already been solved— when the status quo becomes so deeply entrenched that few dare to question it. That’s exactly when disruption takes the stage.

Just ask the tech world.

Back in the early 2000s, most people were content with cell phones that made calls, sent texts, checked emails, and took grainy photos. But then the iPhone arrived, obliterating the notion of what a mobile device could and should do—and resetting the entire game.

We’re at a similar inflection point in hiring. For decades, resumes have been the gold standard in candidate evaluation, despite minimal evolution since their invention. We’ve clung to pedigree, credentials, and job titles as proxies for performance, all while quietly acknowledging that those proxies often miss the mark. As we’ve already explored, what we measure—and how we measure it—fails to protect us from making costly hiring mistakes.

It’s time for a new playbook. A better way. It’s time to start playing moneyball.

The concept of “moneyball” originated with baseball statistician and iconoclast Bill

James, who dared to question everything about how talent was evaluated in Major League Baseball. In his landmark work, The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract (1985), he introduced an analytical model for valuing players based not on appearance or reputation, but on performance data that actually predicted wins.

Then came Billy Beane. As General Manager of the Oakland A’s in the early 2000s, Beane faced a massive talent disadvantage. Unlike the Yankees or Red Sox, the A’s didn’t have deep pockets. The game was rigged against them. So Beane stopped trying to beat rich teams at their own game— and started building a new one.

He used James’ analytics to find undervalued players— those with unflashy resumes, limited name recognition, or “flaws” that caused traditional scouts to overlook them. What those scouts missed were the traits that actually contributed to team success.

While everyone else chased five-tool players (speed, arm strength, power, batting average, and toughness), Beane chased on-base percentage, slugging, and mistake avoidance.

He built a roster of run-producers and out-getters, most of whom cost pennies on the dollar compared to baseball’s elite. The result? Oakland consistently outperformed far wealthier teams and rewrote what winning could look like.

The parallels to talent acquisition are striking.

Like Beane, most of us are up against high-spending competitors—corporate giants like Apple, Google, Tesla, and Nvidia who can out pay, out-perk, and outshine smaller players on brand alone. But here’s the thing: just like in baseball, overpaying for perceived pedigree doesn’t guarantee performance. And hiring based on resume appeal is just as flawed as drafting a pitcher because they “look like an ace.”

A moneyball approach to hiring forces us to rethink our assumptions. Instead of overvaluing elite degrees, polished LinkedIn profiles, or name-brand employers, we shift the focus to impact and contribution.

We look for team members who have produced measurable results, even if they’ve never had a fancy title. We seek out those who consistently deliver but haven’t been formally recognized. We scout talent that’s respected by peers, valued by mentors, and trusted to make things better—not just look good on paper.

This approach relies on the right metrics. Instead of career chronology, we use outcomes-based analytics to identify who’s made a real difference. We measure skill utilization and mastery, rather than assuming competence based on bullet points. We assess value contribution by analyzing innovations driven or revenue generated relative to compensation. We examine growth trajectory, charting how quickly and effectively a person levels up across roles, teams, or industries. And we evaluate cultural fit and team dynamics, recognizing that how someone works with others is just as critical as what they know.

Above all, a moneyball model puts behavioral attributes at the center of hiring. These are the consistent predictors of future performance—far more than GPAs, alma maters, or job titles. Work-ethic, heart, optimism, and maturity are dynamic, repeatable, observable behaviors. They reduce bias, increase fit, and raise performance standards.

They are the true currency of team success.

Still, knowing this and doing something about it are two different things. As Billy Beane discovered, challenging an entrenched system won’t win applause. It will garner significant resistance. Skepticism. Pushback. He was mocked. Dismissed. Marginalized. But while others laughed, he built. And while they clung to tradition, he changed the game.

The same will be true in our organizations. Implementing a moneyball mindset won’t be easy. It means confronting sacred cows and questioning legacy processes. It means designing hiring systems that look beyond the surface and reward what truly matters. It means embracing friction and staying the course even when it feels easier to fall back into old habits.

Because let’s be honest—transformational change never comes without friction. The first one through the wall usually gets bloody. But that’s the price of progress.

If resumes, pedigree, and traditional experience have been overvalued—and if they don’t guarantee success—then we need to replace them with something better. A moneyball model helps us see people for who they are, not just where they’ve been. And that’s the foundation for building teams that win—not on paper, but where it matters most.

The Future Belongs to the Brave

Let’s be clear: this shift won’t be easy.

When Billy Beane broke baseball’s sacred norms, he faced ridicule. Resistance. Rejection. But he stuck with it—and changed the game forever.

If you want better people outcomes, you have to question the status quo. You have to rethink your hiring rituals. You have to focus on what really matters.

That’s what W.H.O.M. is built for. It’s a filter for the future—for building resilient, emotionally intelligent, high- performing teams who actually fit.

The resume isn’t dead. Pedigree and previous experience aren’t meaningless. Reference checks are helpful. But these criteria are no longer enough.

It’s time to stop hiring who looks right—and start hiring who is right.

Keep reading here: https://www.amazon.com/Hire-Right-W-H-M-Performing/dp/1734881518