Hiring bias, AI screening and skills-based hiring at global scale, with Kanwar Kohli, Senior Leader for Global Talent Delivery at Booking.com. Most organisations respond to hiring risk the same way. They add a stage. Then an interviewer. Then a wider debrief. Kanwar Kohli's argument is that this does not raise decision quality, it lowers it, because you keep adding assessors from the same craft who look for the same things, and because a panel assembled to spread risk also spreads ownership until nobody is accountable for the call. What it produces is decision paralysis while everyone waits for consensus. His framing of the underlying problem is that companies are afraid of making the wrong decision rather than trying to make the right one, and that the gain sits in assessing differently rather than assessing more. Kanwar has spent five years at Booking.com building and scaling talent functions across tech, product, commercial and early careers. Before that he ran RPO programmes at Korn Ferry and established Allegis Global Solutions' first EMEA delivery centre, having led talent teams in digital marketing and ad operations. He is an RL100 member and one of this year's Talent 100. On bias, he makes a specific claim. Educational pedigree has lost some of its grip on hiring, but organisational pedigree replaced it. That candidate came from Amazon, get them in. That one came from Meta, definitely get them in. The why rarely follows. He sees this most acutely in scale-ups, where the logic is aspirational, and where hiring people fluent in enterprise guardrails often works against an environment that needs everyone to roll their sleeves up. His challenge to hiring managers is to ask what about that organisation does not fit how we work, and then to assess for adaptability rather than admire the logo. He also says plainly that he has not yet seen any organisation do skills-based hiring properly at scale, which he treats as a reason to experiment in segments rather than a reason to stop. On removing the CV, he is more careful than most guests on this show. There has to be an entry point, something that separates you from the other five hundred applicants. But the CV is context dependent and companies apply it as though it is universal. His method is to look at historic hiring data, find the people still performing five years after they were hired, and work backwards to what the process actually selected for. Booking.com hires around one hundred software engineering graduates a year, and self-taught candidates are holding the same bar or better than people who spent four years studying it. That is a signal the CV did not give. So you remove the CV for that segment, not across the board, and you A/B test it, because experimentation is the only way any process innovates. He also describes the loop now shaping candidate behaviour at volume. Candidates use AI to articulate their experience, which he considers a completely valid use case and which Booking.com has written guidelines around. Application rates climb. Employers reach for AI to assess the volume. AI is assessing AI, and the open question is what counts as a real signal on either side. Alongside that, he sees skills becoming far more transferable, with people moving from UX research and academic research into machine learning and data science as they try to future-proof their own careers. 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: Kanwar Kohli, Senior Leader, Global Talent Delivery at Booking.com Host: Anita Chauhan, Founder, InGoodCo. Watch: https://youtu.be/vK8maWDefNA GUEST Kanwar Kohli, Senior Leader, Global Talent Delivery at Booking.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kanwarkohli/ OUR HOST Anita Chauhan, Founder, InGoodCo., Brand and Thoughtleadership @Willo LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anitachauhan/ LISTEN AND FOLLOW YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@looksgoodonpaperpodcast All episodes: looksgoodonpaper.willo.video POWERED BY WILLO www.willo.video CONNECT WITH US LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/willovideo 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. #hiring #talentacquisition #recruitment Show Resources Willo: willo.video - The most cost-effective way to screen candidates at scale. Interview candidates anywhere & at any timeCV Free Toolkit: cvfree.me/join - Break up with the CV and get everything you need to modernize your hiring approach with skills-based assessmentsAnita Chauhan: linkedin.com/in/anitachauhan - Connect with the host
