For recruiters and hiring managers
Eight jobs in ten years. The story is better than the pattern.
Three of my last four employers restructured or went under, which is a duller explanation than the one a CV invites you to reach for. Five short emails, one a day, and you will know whether I am worth a conversation. So will I.
Five emails, one objection each. One a day, or all at once. Unsubscribe in a click.
01
New York, 1943
The armour goes where the holes are not.
The American military had a problem it thought was arithmetic. Bombers were coming back from raids over Europe with their fuselages punched full of holes, and the obvious answer was more armour. Armour is heavy, so it had to go only where it was needed. So they mapped the damage across every aircraft that returned and prepared to reinforce the places with the most hits.
Abraham Wald, a mathematician at Columbia, told them they had it exactly backwards.
Every plane they had measured was a plane that came home. The holes in those fuselages marked the places an aircraft could be hit and still fly. The engines were clean in the data not because they were never hit, but because the aircraft hit there were at the bottom of the Channel and nobody had measured them.
The damage you can see is the damage that was survivable. The armour goes where the holes are not.
A CV is a returning bomber. The short tenures on mine are not places I walked away from. Januar filed for bankruptcy and let everyone go. GetWhy restructured when new investors arrived. Omada is restructuring now, which is why you are reading this. Those are the aircraft that did not come home. The damage is visible on my record precisely because I am the one still flying, and you are counting the holes in the only plane you can measure.
01
Seattle, 2018
The machine learned exactly what it was shown.
In 2014 Amazon set out to automate the top of its hiring funnel. The idea was clean. Feed a model ten years of CVs, tell it which of those people the company had gone on to hire, and let it score every applicant from then on, one star to five. Recruiters would read the fives.
It worked. That was the problem.
The ten years of CVs it learned from had come overwhelmingly from men, so the model concluded that being a man was part of what a strong candidate looked like. It marked down CVs containing the word "women's", as in women's chess club captain. It marked down CVs naming all-women's colleges. It rewarded the verbs that turned up more often on men's CVs, words like "executed" and "captured".
Nobody had told it to do any of that. It had been asked to predict who Amazon would hire, and it did, accurately. Amazon could not make it stop, and scrapped the project in 2017.
That model was not broken. It was a mirror. It had learned the shape of the CVs that got through and screened for the shape instead of the person, which is also what forty seconds of human scanning does. Mine has the wrong shape: too many employers, no straight line, a company running on the side. Whatever you would actually want from me is not in the shape.
01
Mountain View, 2013
They had the data. The screens predicted nothing.
For years Google hired the way the industry admired. It asked for transcripts, grade averages and test scores. It asked the puzzles it became famous for: how many golf balls fit inside an aeroplane, how many petrol stations there are in Manhattan.
Then it did something unusual for a company that was already winning. It went back and checked. It matched what it had screened people on against how those same people actually performed once they were inside the building.
None of it predicted anything. Laszlo Bock, who ran hiring there, said so plainly in 2013: grade averages and test scores were "worthless" as criteria, and the brainteasers were "a complete waste of time". His explanation for why the puzzles had survived so long is the part worth sitting with. They served, he said, "primarily to make the interviewer feel smart".
Google stopped asking. Not because the criteria were unfair, but because it finally had enough data to show they were empty.
The screens on my CV are the same species. How long each job lasted, which certificates are still in date, whether the titles climbed in a straight line. All cheap to check, and on the largest body of evidence anyone has gathered, close to empty. I am not asking you to ignore them. I am asking for what Google did next, which was to test them against what the person could actually do.
02
In your head, not on the call
What you are probably thinking
Roughly this, in about this order, and none of it is unfair. I would think the same.
- 01
More for Less, Yoopper, Accenture, Deloitte twice, Januar, GetWhy, Omada. He has never stayed anywhere long.
- 02
Developer, then identity, then cyber risk, then wargaming, then security, now presales. I cannot tell what he is.
- 03
He runs his own software company alongside a full-time job. So either it is not real, or he is not fully here.
- 04
No CISSP, no CISM, no vendor certification. There is, however, a Private Military Contractor certificate.
The last one is fair enough. I will get to it on day four, and it is a better story than you are expecting.
Most candidates ask you to look past the pattern.
I would rather just explain it, one answer a day for five days.
Not with adjectives. With what actually happened, including the parts that do not flatter me. There is a thread under all those job titles and it is a simple one: I am the person you bring in when the thing does not exist yet. Every role on my CV bar one, I was the first person doing it. Five emails is enough to show you that, or to convince you I am not what you need, which is also a useful afternoon for both of us.
03
What you get
Five emails, five days, one objection each
No newsletter, no drip campaign that never ends, no pitch deck. Five emails, then it stops on its own. One a day, or all five at once if you are hiring right now and would rather not wait a week.
Day one
Three of my last four exits were not my decision
Every move, named, with who made it. A bankruptcy, two restructurings, and the one job on my CV I did not apply for.
Day two
Seven job titles, one actual job
Every role except one, I was the first person doing it. What that is worth, and the kind of seat I would be wrong for.
Day three
Four to six hours a week, in writing
What the company on the side actually is, what my employer signed, and what it has taught me that an employer gets for free.
Day four
The parts I would not claim in an interview
The certifications I do not hold and why, the parts of my own stack I would not claim, the criticism I get repeatedly, and the production database I deleted.
Day five
Every number on my CV, and the two I am changing
Each figure, what it counts, who would confirm it, and the one I got wrong and am correcting in front of you.
04
Before you decide it is not for you
You do not need to have a role for me
- You do not need to be hiring right now.
- You do not need to work in cyber security or understand identity governance.
- You do not need to reply to anything, ever.
Day four is worth reading even if you never speak to me. Knowing what a candidate will not claim about themselves is a screening tool you can use on anyone.
Send me the five emails
One field, and one decision. That is the whole form.
P.S.If you would rather just read the CV and make your own mind up, that is what /record is for. It is the whole thing, with nothing gated, and there is no form on it.
P.P.S.Yes, I am aware that answering the objection about being too broad by building a five-part email funnel about myself is not obviously helping my case. Day two covers it.