Now that I lead a team, I read CVs — a lot of them — and hiring has quietly become one of the most consequential parts of my job, because who's on the team matters more than almost any technical decision I'll make. And after enough of them, I've noticed that what I actually look for has drifted a long way from what candidates think I'm looking for. Nearly every data CV leads with the same thing: a dense wall of technologies, the longest possible list of tools and languages and platforms. And I've more or less stopped being impressed by it. Here's what I've learned to look for instead.

Why the technology wall stopped impressing me

Let me be fair to the tools list first: it's not useless. It tells me roughly where someone's been and gives us things to talk about. But it's become almost meaningless as a differentiator, for a couple of reasons I had to learn by hiring.

First, everyone has it. The tools list is table stakes; a long one no longer distinguishes anyone because they've all got one. Second, and more importantly, the specific technologies matter far less than people think, because they change. The hot stack of today is legacy in a few years — I've lived through enough of that cycle now to feel it in my bones. Someone whose entire value is fluency in this year's specific tools is someone whose value quietly erodes as the tools turn over. What I actually need is someone who'll still be valuable when the toolset has moved on, which the tools list tells me nothing about.

So I read past it, fairly quickly, to the things that actually predict whether someone will be good on my team in two years, not just on day one.

What I actually look for

  • Evidence of learning, not just knowing. The most valuable signal in a CV is a trajectory of picking things up — someone who's demonstrably moved from one thing to another, learned new domains, adapted. Because the specific knowledge dates; the ability and habit of learning is what stays valuable as everything around it changes. A candidate who learned three different stacks over their career tells me far more than one who lists thirty tools from a single one.
  • Signs they can communicate. This is the big one, and it's the hardest to fake and the most predictive. Can this person explain things? A CV that describes work in clear, human terms — that says why something mattered and what it achieved, not just which technologies were involved — is a CV written by someone who can probably talk to a stakeholder, translate between the business and the team, and make their work legible to others. Data work is a communication job wearing a technical costume, and the CV itself is a communication sample. I read it as one.
  • Judgement over completeness. I'd rather see someone describe one thing they did with real understanding — the problem, the trade-offs, why they chose what they chose — than a breathless list of everything they've ever touched. Depth of understanding on one real problem signals judgement. A comprehensive tools inventory signals only exposure. Judgement is what I can't train; exposure I can provide.
  • Curiosity that shows. The candidates who turn out best tend to leave traces of genuine interest — a side project, a talk, a thing they learned because they wanted to rather than because a job required it. It's a small signal and a strong one, because curiosity is the engine under all the learning, and I can't install it in someone who hasn't got it.

The reframe: I'm hiring for who they'll become

Underneath all of this is a shift in what I think I'm actually doing when I hire. I used to think — as a candidate myself, and early as a hirer — that hiring was about matching a person's current skills to a current need: they know X, I need X, match. Leading a team has taught me it's much more about trajectory. I'm not hiring the person they are today so much as betting on the person they'll become over the next few years on my team — and that bet rides on learning ability, communication, judgement, and curiosity, none of which are on the tools list.

The specific technical skills, honestly, are the most trainable part. A curious, communicative person with good judgement and a habit of learning can pick up whatever tool the job needs, and will keep picking up the next one, and the next. A person with a long tools list but no evidence of those deeper traits is a snapshot that starts dating the day they're hired.

A CV's technology wall tells you where someone has been. It says almost nothing about where they can go — and where they can go, which is learning, communication, judgement, and curiosity, is the only thing worth hiring for, because the tools you're hiring them to use will be different by the time it matters.

A note to candidates, then

Since some of the people I most want to hire might read this: I know the pressure to lead with the tools wall — everyone does it, and it feels safe. But if you want to catch the eye of someone hiring the way I've learned to, spend less of your CV proving you've touched everything, and more of it communicating — clearly, in human terms — about a small number of things you genuinely understand, why they mattered, and what you learned. Show me you can explain, that you can learn, and that you exercise judgement, and I'll happily teach you whichever tool this year's stack demands. The wall of technologies impresses the keyword filter. It's the person behind it — the learner, the communicator, the one with judgement — that I'm actually trying to hire.