​ A changing hiring landscape

If you're hiring into specialist financial services projects right now, you've probably already sensed that something has shifted. Candidate CVs look more polished. Experience sounds more impressive. And yet, when someone arrives in the role, what you get doesn't always match what you were sold.

A bad hire has always been expensive. But in financial services, where delivery timelines are tight, systems are complex, and projects carry serious business pressure, the consequences extend well beyond recruitment costs. As explored in our previous blog, The Hidden Cost of a Bad Hire, the impact can reach up to 30% of that employee's annual salary according to SHRM, before you factor in delayed delivery, team strain, or lost momentum.

What's changed isn't the existence of misrepresented candidates. It's how hard they've become to spot.

What "misrepresented experience" actually looks like

Here's the uncomfortable truth: two candidates can have almost identical CVs while offering completely different levels of real-life delivery capability.

One might describe project exposure as ownership. Another might frame system familiarity as hands-on expertise. Someone else may have worked within a large transformation programme without ever owning a meaningful piece of it, but on paper? Practically indistinguishable.

This isn't always a deliberate deception, but in a competitive market, candidates know they're being measured against others with similar backgrounds and are trying hard to make their experience stand out. AI-assisted CV tools have compounded this further, making experience appear more aligned on paper than it may be in practice. The result is CVs that are often technically accurate, but strategically optimised.

Why this is becoming more difficult to assess

In specialist areas like investment platforms, trading systems, or middle office change, the talent pool is often thin on the ground and pressure to hire quickly is real.

Technical keywords no longer tell you enough. A candidate can know the right terminology, reference the right projects, and present confidently, while still having been a peripheral contributor rather than a true delivery lead.

Gaining clarity

The answer isn't slowing hiring down. It's knowing where to look.

Real delivery experience surfaces in the detail. Not what someone worked on, but what they personally owned. Not the project outcome, but the specific problems they solved to get there. Someone who has genuinely led delivery, describes it from the inside, the pressure points, the trade-offs, the moments where things went sideways and what they did about it. Someone who observed it from the periphery tends to describe it from the outside.

The right questions expose that difference quickly. What part of the project did you own? What broke (or went wrong), and how did you fix it? Walk me through the decision when delivery stalled. These aren't difficult questions, but they require someone who knows what a convincing answer actually looks like in this market, and what a vague one is masking.

Inconsistencies also become visible when you know the environment well. A CV claiming delivery leadership but language that describes it passively. A project timeline that doesn't quite match the system they say they implemented. None of these are definitive on their own, but together they signal where more scrutiny is needed. It's something we push for actively, both in our own process and in the advice we give clients early in a search. The more critical the role, the earlier those conversations about validation should happen, not as a final check, but as a thread running through the whole process.

Face-to-face meetings later in the process add another convincing layer, even after remote screening has been completed. It’s much easier to ‘feel’ whether the answers are authentic in a face 2 face setting. We actively encourage clients to build this in wherever possible. For critical roles, that additional step regularly changes outcomes.

The focus going forward

The landscape has shifted, since Covid and the emergence if AI assisted workflows CVs are more polished, recruitment cycles are shorter, and hiring decisions are being made with less visibility than before. The businesses that navigate this well aren't necessarily moving slower, they're looking harder for the right things.

Because hiring confidently doesn't come from receiving a strong CV. It comes from successfully uncovering what's behind it.

Hiring into a critical financial services project? Do not leave it to chance. Our team screens deeper, questions harder, and knows this market inside out. Reach out to our sales director Pat to talk through your current search.