In short: a sound hiring decision is not based on a candidate’s overall impression. It starts with a clear description of the real work, compares people on consistent evidence and accounts for the role, manager, team and working principles.
Recruitment’s biggest blind spot is not the candidate. It is what we fail to see in them.
Mikk Orglaan and Katarina Künnapas approached the question of fit between people and work from different directions. Mikk came to it as an entrepreneur, investor and business mentor with nearly 30 years of experience in the software world. Katarina came mainly through recruitment work in technology companies. Their professional stories differ, yet the insight born from their mistakes is strikingly similar: we make consequential decisions about people without understanding either the person or the work in which they are expected to create value well enough.
This is not only a recruitment problem. The same blind spot shapes how teams are assembled, employees are managed, companies expand and investments are made.
Mikk saw the consequences from the company and team side
Mikk has been through two bankruptcies: one in his own company and another in a startup in which he had invested. In his experience, problems involving people, roles and collaboration played a significant part in both. These problems are not always visible when a decision is made. They can smoulder for years and surface precisely when a company most needs shared direction and swift action.
He has also seen the opposite. One 20-person team, he says, only began to breathe more freely and focus on growth after five people were replaced and two others changed roles. Mikk worked with the company as an external business mentor. For him, the best possible outcome was that the team could move forward without him.
This does not mean that replacing people is the answer to every difficult team situation. The example shows how much depends on who does what work, with whom and with what responsibility. Sometimes a person needs to be replaced. Sometimes it is enough for someone finally to do work in which their abilities can genuinely emerge.
Katarina saw the same problem from the other side of the table
Katarina has seen the consequences of poor hiring decisions and managerial inattention from the recruitment side. She has been in situations where she and a manager look at the same candidate or workplace situation but do not see the same nuances. A recruiter can notice a risk and speak about it. The decision—and the organisational change needed to address it—may still be outside the recruiter’s control.
That sense of having her hands tied has caused frustration and driven her to search for better methods. Theories and tools exist, but they are fragmented. Using them meaningfully takes time, and one person may have neither the mandate nor the opportunity to apply them properly. When assessment stops halfway, the result is once again mediocre or poor. The bad experience then reinforces an old belief: “See? Assessing people is pointless.”
Mikk and Katarina share one question: why do we accept this way of working when its cost is so high?
Intuition mostly recognises our own world
We all experience the world through ourselves. If an ability comes naturally to me, I may treat it as basic and expect it from everyone else. If another person can do something I cannot, their most valuable strength may remain completely invisible to me.
A fast decision-maker may see a thorough candidate as slow. A methodical manager may see a quick decision-maker as superficial. One person notices a small change in a client’s voice or a team’s behaviour; another sees nothing. Which one is wrong? We cannot decide that merely by asking which one is the manager.
Intuition helps us interpret situations quickly, but it rests on our previous experience, preferences and blind spots. When a manager says, “I know the right person when I see them,” it is worth asking: do they recognise the person’s ability to create value in this work, or simply someone with whom conversation feels easy?
Empathy alone is not enough either. Strong empathy helps us listen, and analytical ability helps us compare, but neither gives direct access to another person’s experience. Two people may use the same words while meaning different ways of working, levels of pressure tolerance or expectations of collaboration. We must test our interpretation against examples and real situations. No one can read another person infallibly.
A CV, a pleasant interview and a test do not yet describe fit
A CV shows a person’s previous path and how well they can present it. Yet the same job title may describe entirely different work in two companies. A pleasant interview may demonstrate conversational skill, but not how someone tackles the hardest task in the role.
A test may describe a particular trait or way of working. But people do not work in a vacuum. Unless we have described the actual tasks, workload, decision authority, manager and team, a test alone cannot tell us whether someone will perform well in the role or want to stay. Combining several tests does not solve the problem of missing context. Sometimes it merely gives our bias a persuasive-looking percentage.
“Culture fit” is also an empty phrase unless we can explain what kind of collaboration we mean. Otherwise, we choose someone who resembles us and once again overlook the capability the team needs most.
That is why the real work must be described before candidates are considered. Which tasks recur? Which skills are essential, and which can be learned? Who depends on the results of this role? Candidates should then be asked comparable work-related questions, given an opportunity to solve a relevant task and assessed with tests only when it is clear what those tests do—and do not—measure.
The “best candidate” is not the person who creates the best overall impression. It is the person whose contribution fits the work, the team and the real conditions most closely. Even then, the decision is not a certain prediction. It is a reasoned hypothesis that must be checked later.
Working principles become clear only when someone is punished
Before a person joins, companies talk about values: openness, responsibility, collaboration and trust. Two people can agree with every one of those words while expecting opposite behaviours.
For one manager, responsibility means making decisions independently. For another, it means coordinating every important step. One sees voicing disagreement as honesty; another sees it as insubordination. Employees often discover which interpretation applies only after they have behaved “incorrectly”. Working principles are then synchronised through a process of trial and punishment.
A mismatch in values, beliefs and working principles creates more than discomfort. It leads to recurring disputes, misunderstood assignments, excessive supervision and rework. The issue is not that everyone must think alike. The issue is whether people know how they make decisions together and where their principles diverge.
This should be discussed during recruitment. What happens when a deadline and quality conflict? When does the employee decide independently? How do they tell a manager that an instruction does not work? Situations like these reveal more about collaboration than a list of values on a website.
If someone leaves, the problem may not have been the person
A new employee may leave because they were selected for the wrong work. They may also leave because the promised job and the real job did not match, onboarding failed or the manager’s way of working prevented them from succeeding. A person can also remain for years without their strongest abilities ever being used.
Fit is not a permanent label attached to a person. It emerges between the person, the work, the manager and the team. All four change. A new client changes the tasks, a colleague leaves, responsibility shifts or the person develops beyond the role they once had.
If we want better outcomes, we must distinguish between a hiring error, an onboarding failure and a work-design problem. Otherwise, we improve the interview when management is what needs to change.
Investors see the numbers, but not always the team
Before acquiring or investing in a company, people know how to inspect financial results, contracts and technology. The way people and teams actually work together may be reduced to a handful of meetings with management. Some transactions include thorough people and culture due diligence. The question is how often it reaches real working principles and unresolved conflicts—and whether it continues after the deal.
Who actually holds a critical client relationship together? Which leaders cannot make decisions with each other? Does an important result depend on one overloaded person? What happens when two teams must begin working together while holding opposite ideas about responsibility?
A mismatch that has simmered for years can erupt during expansion or a merger. At that point, more than the cost of one hire is at stake; sometimes the purpose of a six-, seven- or eight-figure transaction is on the line. Mikk has seen how painfully a mistaken view of a team can affect both an investor and an entrepreneur.
When expanding into foreign markets, communicating only with senior leaders is not enough. The real work happens in teams. If responsibility for integrating people is left entirely to team leaders who lack the time, skills or authority to do it, the risk does not disappear. It is merely deferred.
A person is not an instrument from which to extract a result
Immanuel Kant’s practical imperative tells us not to treat a person merely as a means. An employee is not a tool from which a result can be extracted and which can then be replaced. Yet people often become interchangeable resources in practice when their abilities, boundaries and working conditions are not treated as part of management decisions.
The same attitude can appear in the use of AI. A difficult human problem is simply pushed onto someone or something else. In a small company, it may sound like this: “We have no HR function, so we have no HR problem.” In a large company, one highly capable HR professional may have resolved tensions for years so effectively that the board never realises how much depends on that person’s competence.
HR has become a hot potato. The work of a recruiter or HR professional may simultaneously include documents, contracts, job advertisements, candidate communication, onboarding, advising managers and understanding team performance. If administration consumes all available time, we cannot expect deep work on people’s capabilities and collaboration.
In some cases, the existing way of working is also defended and deeper inquiry resisted. Mikk and Katarina do not frame this as an accusation against every HR professional or recruiter. People have different strengths and ways of working; leaders also decide what time, mandate and tools are available. If the board restricts those conditions, it cannot simultaneously ask why the organisation lacks deeper expertise.
Companies could measure the total cost of finding and employing a new person, time to independent performance, friction at work, use of strengths and the reasons people stay or leave. Employee Acquisition Cost, Employee Lifetime Value, Employee Friction Index and eNPS are useful only when the company defines precisely what they mean. They do not measure a person’s value as a human being.
Why now?
AI is changing more and more work that used to be done manually. For Mikk and Katarina, this makes the question of a person’s real contribution even more urgent. If technology can expand capability, the advantage goes to the company that better understands where human strengths connect with that capability. This does not mean squeezing more output from people. It means designing work so that people and technology help each other create more value.
Both have concluded that many employees do not yet understand their strongest professional capabilities, while employers know neither those people nor their organisation’s real way of working well enough. The result is the hiring of an “excellent mediocrity”: a candidate who makes a strong general impression but is expected to produce exceptional results in conditions where their abilities cannot take effect. The manager believes they made the best possible choice. The team works hard. The outcome is either exhausting stagnation or a company that does not grow.
Katarina calls the necessary change a recruitment revolution. Mikk speaks of a transformative leap. Both mean a qualitative shift: understanding the person and the work cannot remain a chance side activity that begins with a CV and ends with intuition.
Sparkly.hr was created for this purpose. The platform aims to make the relationships between a person, the work, the team and working principles visible, so that leaders can better justify their decisions and change them when necessary. The platform does not know a person on their behalf or make human judgement infallible. It helps people ask questions and compare information that might otherwise remain unseen.
The platform alone is not enough. It requires leaders and owners who feel the need to understand more, have the courage to test their assumptions and trust both people and a new way of working enough to try it.
In 2026, decades of habit are no longer a sufficient reason to continue as we always have—especially when much of a person’s capability remains unused simply because the assessor’s intuition cannot see it.
If we can understand people better and align work more closely with their abilities, we should. It is respectful to the candidate, the employee, the manager and the company.
Frequently asked questions
What is recruitment’s biggest blind spot?
The biggest blind spot is the assumption that a candidate can be assessed separately from the actual work, manager and team. Fit emerges from the interaction of all these factors.
Should intuition play a role in recruitment?
Intuition can be one observation, but it should not be the sole basis for a decision. It must be tested against comparable questions, work-related evidence and relevant tasks.
What should happen before candidates are assessed?
Define the real tasks, essential and learnable skills, decision authority, working relationships and conditions in which results are expected.
Can a test show who fits a role?
A test can provide useful information about a specific trait or way of working, but it cannot determine fit by itself. Results must be interpreted alongside the work, manager, team and other evidence.