OPINION-COLUMN | The ‘CV trap’: Why Singapore must hire for potential, not pedigree
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If the city-state is to turn AI into a national advantage, companies must rethink how they evaluate talent
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THERE is a quiet, polite crisis unfolding in Singapore’s talent ecosystem. It does not make headlines; in fact, it is routinely dressed up as prudence, rigour and sound governance.
But our systematic preference for people who look right on paper over unconventional talent that can help solve for the future is one of the more consequential stewardship challenges.
Budget 2026 carried a clear message about Singapore’s next growth chapter. Prime Minister Lawrence Wong placed artificial intelligence (AI) at the centre of national strategy, announcing sector-focused AI missions and a new National AI Council to drive them. The ambition is explicit: Singapore must not merely just adapt to disruption, but lead it.
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Technology strategy alone will not determine whether that ambition succeeds. Talent strategy will.
PM Wong’s guidance to adapt, compete and move forward with confidence is indeed the right clarion call. But it leaves employers with a question we seldom ask honestly: Are our hiring practices and our invisible credentialism built for the future he described – or are we caught in the “CV trap”?
The curriculum vitae (CV) trap is not about hiring unqualified people. It is the quiet assumption that the “right” candidate must come from the right school, work in the right industry and hold the right job title. Direct experience matters. Yet when we treat it as the only safe proxy for capability, we start to confuse familiarity with competence.
The fallacy of “directly relevant” experience
Walk into many private equity firms in Singapore and you will find a familiar talent profile: CFA holders, accounting alumni, former bankers – excellent on paper.
Yet the industries these funds invest in are complex operating systems. An operator who has built a manufacturing network across Asean or run clinical operations for a hospital group brings insight that no spreadsheet can replicate. Too often, that person does not even get the interview.
Investment committees have rejected operators with hard-won sector judgment because they “lacked transaction exposure”, while approving candidates who had modelled industries they had never worked in.
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This pattern repeats across sectors. Product roles are reserved for engineers, professional services firms prefer former consultants, human resources (HR) management functions are staffed almost exclusively by career HR professionals, despite the reality that some of the most transformative people leaders have been seasoned P&L (profit and loss) owners who, viscerally, understand the link between human performance and business outcomes.
We have institutionalised a simple equation: directly relevant education plus directly relevant experience equals “qualified candidate”. Everything else equals risk. The cultural roots of this are well understood. When in doubt, hire the person who has already done the job. It is a risk management heuristic masked as talent strategy.
What the world’s best talent markets know
In more dynamic talent markets, domain-switching is not merely tolerated; it is treated as evidence of range and adaptive capacity.
Brian Chesky trained as an industrial designer, and built Airbnb into one of the most disruptive hospitality businesses in the world, precisely because he saw the industry through a guest’s eyes rather than a hotelier’s.
When Chanel appointed Leena Nair – formerly Unilever’s chief HR officer – as global chief executive officer in 2021, the move was widely described as unconventional. It has since proven visionary.
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Closer to home, DBS’ transformation under Piyush Gupta was built on a deliberate mixing of technologists, data specialists and business leaders – engineers working alongside bankers, not downstream as an IT service. The point is not that experience is irrelevant, but that aptitude and judgment travel.
Direct experience is valuable; but in fast-changing systems, it decays faster than curiosity, pattern recognition and learning agility.
The classroom is the root
Singapore’s education system has delivered extraordinary outcomes. Yet it has historically rewarded students who optimise for examinations more than those who navigate ambiguity, synthesise across disciplines and solve real problems. We produce technically proficient graduates, but do we produce enough creatively adaptive thinkers?
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There are promising departures from convention. The NUS High School of Mathematics and Science, for instance, does not merely teach Stem (science, technology, engineering and mathematics); it trains students to apply rigorous scientific and mathematical thinking to real-world problem-solving.
The habits of mind this builds – cross-disciplinary reasoning, intellectual risk-taking, comfort with uncertainty – are precisely what the next economy will reward. The question is whether we have the institutional courage to let such models reshape the mainstream, rather than remain admired exceptions.
Augmentation key to workforce effectiveness
PM Wong has been explicit that Singapore’s AI strategy is not jobless growth. AI is meant to augment human capability, not replace it; productivity gains should translate into better jobs and wages.
That changes what “good hiring” means. Technology will undoubtedly reshape work.
But the more important question is how organisations redesign roles around what humans uniquely contribute.
Too many workforce conversations still revolve around cost optimisation, headcount ratios and efficiency targets. Those matter, but they are no longer sufficient. The organisations that thrive will pursue a dual mandate: drive efficiency while deliberately building human plus AI capability that expands problem-solving capacity.
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If Singapore is to turn AI into a national advantage, companies must rethink how they evaluate talent. We need teams structurally equipped to solve problems that do not yet exist.
That requires a different philosophy, one that hires for learning agility and judgment, not just yesterday’s job description. One that sees a career pivot not as a red flag, but as evidence of range.
The CV is not the person
The irony of the CV trap, is that in screening for safety, we create fragility. We build organisations full of people who have all looked at the world from similar lenses, trained in the similar frameworks, validated by similar institutions.
And then we wonder why our strategic thinking feels incremental, or why our boards may not have genuine diversity of thought, or why our most talented people quietly take their energy elsewhere.
In many cases, the answer is uncomfortable but simple: We hired for familiarity, and then mistook it for competence.
PM Wong told Parliament that every Singaporean willing to adapt and learn should be able to secure a good job and earn a good living. That is a worthy promise and employers must help honour it. Are we willing to look at the candidate who took a detour, switched industries, or built something unconventional, and see potential rather than risk?
Singapore cannot afford the waste of the CV trap. As a city-state competing in a world being reshaped by AI, deglobalisation, and the most profound workforce disruption of all times, our only sustainable edge is human capital – and human capital is a capability, not a credential.
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The next Chesky or Nair may already be in Singapore. We will find them only if we stop mistaking the CV for the person. The stewardship question for boards and leadership teams is straightforward: Which risks are we really managing – the organisation’s short-term comfort, or its long-term competitiveness?
Good governance manages risk; but true stewardship expands possibility. And while it is tempting to sort people neatly into pigeonholes, the most capable individuals rarely stay confined there. The pigeonhole may be comfortable; but the sky is limitless.
The writer is global leader, executive compensation and board advisory at WTW. He is a governing council member at the Singapore Institute of Directors, where he chairs the sustainability chapter.
Stewardship Matters is a monthly column that examines business disruptions, governance dilemmas and boardroom challenges in an increasingly complex world.
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