So many of the job briefs we receive start the same way. The person must be curious. They must have high learning agility. They must be constantly looking to grow and evolve, comfortable with ambiguity, and energised by change.
Then comes the rest of the brief: five years in the same type of role, the same industry, a steady step up every two to three years.
Here’s the problem. The people who are genuinely high on curiosity and learning agility very rarely have a linear CV.
Curiosity makes people move towards new problems. Learning agility means they get bored once they’ve mastered something. So their careers tend to zigzag: a move from sales into product, a stint at a startup that didn’t work out, a side project that became a job, a sideways step to learn something they couldn’t learn where they were.
On paper, that can look unfocused. In reality, it’s often the clearest evidence you’ll get that someone has the exact attributes the brief asks for.
What a non-linear CV can tell you
When we see a career that hasn’t followed a straight line, we look for the pattern underneath it. Often it shows someone who has:
- Learned quickly in unfamiliar environments, more than once
- Chosen interesting problems over bigger titles
- Built something without a playbook to follow
- Been honest about what they didn’t know, and gone and found out
These are the people who thrive when a growth company pivots, a role changes shape every six months, and nobody has done the job before.
Why it matters most in growth companies
Ambitious businesses are rarely stable. Priorities shift, teams double, and the role you hire for today won’t look the same in a year. A perfectly linear career is often built for stability and predictability, which is exactly what these environments can’t offer.
If the role needs someone who can handle ambiguity, the best evidence is someone who has already chosen it.
How we approach it differently
We challenge the brief before we start the search. When a brief asks for curiosity and learning agility, we talk through what that actually looks like in the role and how are we going to measure this.
We then look for evidence of the attributes, not just the job titles. And we use structured interviews, tailored to every role, so every candidate is assessed on how they think, learn and adapt, not just on what’s on their CV.
If you’re hiring, ask yourself
- Have I written the brief around outcomes, or around a career path?
- Which requirements are truly essential, and what requirements are based on assumptions?
- Am I looking for a straight line, or for a pattern?
- Does my interview process test how someone learns, or only what they already know?
The people who will grow with your business rarely arrive in a straight line. If your brief asks for curiosity, make sure your process can recognise it when it shows up.