A Job Description Tells You the Role. A Conversation Tells You the Fit.

There are assignments that make you pause before you even pick up the phone.

This was one of them.

The brief was for an AI & Startup Incubator Expert. It was a world I had never recruited in before, filled with terminology that, at first glance, felt completely outside my comfort zone.

For a moment, I questioned whether I was the right person to lead the search.
Then I reminded myself of something I had already learned.
Recruitment has never been about knowing every industry.
It's about knowing how to understand people.

So instead of looking for someone who matched every keyword in the brief, I spent my time speaking with people.
A lot of people.

Nearly thirty conversations later, the picture became much clearer.
What looked like a highly technical position on paper was actually looking for something deeper: curiosity, commercial thinking, entrepreneurial mindset and the ability to build ecosystems around innovation.

By the end of the search, I presented eight shortlisted candidates.
Two stood out.

Interestingly, they couldn't have been more different.
One brought an exceptional entrepreneurial vision and understood how innovation ecosystems grow.
The other had built incubators from the ground up and knew exactly how to execute every operational detail.

The client called after the interviews with a sentence I'll never forget.
"We honestly don't know which one to choose. They're both exactly what we need, just in different ways."

Eventually, one candidate accepted the offer and joined the organisation.

But the biggest lesson wasn't that the search was successful.

It was discovering that sometimes the best candidate appears only after you stop trying to find someone who looks perfect on paper and start understanding what success actually looks like.

Because industries can be learned.
Job descriptions can be interpreted.
But genuine curiosity, thoughtful conversations and the ability to recognise potential will always be more valuable than simply matching keywords.

Sometimes the best recruitment starts by asking better questions.