Signals Are Clues, Not Conclusions

Author: Thomas Murgatroyd (CEO, Cloudcat Recruitment)

Imagine one million Skittles in a jar. Every one is a slightly different shade of every colour imaginable. 🟢 🔵 🔴 🟠 🟡

Our job is to sort through them.

Recruitment is a game of characterisation.

To explain why the Skittle that looks pink is actually red.

Why the red one is, in practice, much closer to blue.

Why two candidates with almost identical CVs may create completely different outcomes in the same role.

That is the real work behind recruitment.

Hiring managers need decisions. Teams need consistency. So we build categories: seniority, sector experience, technical capability, culture add, leadership potential.

We look for signals: job titles, tenure, education, brands, progression, interview performance.

Those systems matter. Without them, hiring becomes vague, inconsistent and hard to defend.

But the risk is obvious: people are not categories.

A candidate can have the right title and lack the substance. Another can have an unconventional background and be exactly what the business needs.

Someone can interview poorly because they are exhausted, anxious or tired of translating their whole career into neat, familiar boxes.

And candidates are exhausted. 🥱

Exhausted by being reduced to keywords. By explaining why a career break was not a lack of ambition. By being told they are “not quite the profile” when the profile was too narrow to recognise what they could bring.

The best recruitment does not abandon systems. It uses them carefully.

It treats signals as clues, not conclusions.

It creates enough structure to make good decisions, while leaving enough curiosity to see the person in front of you.

Because hiring is not about finding the perfect Skittle.

It is about understanding its actual colour, in the context of the jar.

But in defence of characterisation, if you’re applying to be a blue Skittle, it helps to actually be one 🔵