Place a chessboard in front of a grandmaster for a few seconds, remove it, and they may still remember where most of the pieces were. Show the same board to a beginner, and much of the position disappears almost immediately.
It is tempting to explain this by saying the grandmaster has a better memory or a more powerful brain. The research suggests something more interesting. Chess experts do not necessarily see more pieces. They see more meaning.
A beginner sees a bishop, three pawns, a knight and an open square. A master sees an exposed king, a weak diagonal, a familiar defensive structure and a threat that may become serious several moves later. The pieces are the same. The quality of interpretation is different.
This distinction offers a useful way to think about hiring.
Most hiring teams have access to roughly the same information: CVs, portfolios, interviews, assessments, references and, increasingly, AI-generated candidate summaries. Yet two companies can review the same person and reach completely different conclusions. One sees a candidate who lacks a familiar job title. The other sees evidence of learning speed, sound judgment and the ability to solve the kind of problems the business will face next.
The difference is rarely the amount of information available. It is the ability to recognise what the information means.
Strong Hiring Begins With Pattern Recognition
One of the most influential findings in the psychology of chess came from experiments in which players were briefly shown chess positions and asked to reconstruct them.
Expert players performed remarkably well when the pieces came from realistic games. When the pieces were arranged randomly, much of their advantage disappeared. This showed that their memory depended heavily on recognising meaningful configurations built through years of experience. They were not memorising dozens of isolated objects. They were reading the position as a connected whole.
Experienced recruiters often work in a similar way.
A junior recruiter may read a CV line by line: degree, company, title, years of experience, list of tools. A stronger recruiter begins connecting the details.
A candidate who moved from customer support into product operations, taught herself basic data analysis and later redesigned a reporting process may not have the conventional background for an operations role. Still, the sequence reveals something useful: curiosity, initiative, growing responsibility and an ability to turn practical problems into systems.
Those qualities may be more predictive than the job titles themselves.
Pattern recognition in hiring, however, should not be confused with quickly deciding that someone “looks right.” A genuine pattern is supported by several related pieces of evidence. A stereotype is often one visible characteristic pretending to explain the whole person.
That difference matters.
Do Not Evaluate the Pieces in Isolation
A chess piece has no fixed value outside its position.
A knight can be powerful at the centre of the board and almost irrelevant at its edge. A pawn may appear insignificant until it controls a critical square. Even the queen, the strongest piece, can become a liability when moved without support.
Hiring decisions often go wrong because companies assign fixed value to individual credentials.
A degree from a prestigious university is treated as proof of intelligence. Experience at a well-known company becomes proof of competence. A long list of technical tools becomes proof of depth. Five years in a role becomes proof that someone is better prepared than a person with three.
Each of these may provide useful information. None explains a candidate fully.
Experience at a respected organisation could mean that someone learned from exceptional people and handled complex work. It could also mean that the company’s strong systems carried them. A candidate from a smaller business may have had less impressive branding around their work but far more ownership, uncertainty and direct responsibility.
The relevant question is not simply, “How valuable is this credential?”
It is, “What did this experience require from the person, and how does that relate to the position we are trying to fill?”
Chess masters understand that the board gives each piece its meaning. Good hiring teams understand that context gives each achievement its meaning.
Look for the Candidate’s Next Move
A CV is a record of moves that have already been made. Hiring is a decision about what someone may be capable of doing next.
That requires a different kind of attention.
Suppose two candidates have both managed teams of five people. The first inherited an established team, clear targets and stable processes. The second joined during a difficult period, rebuilt trust, clarified responsibilities and helped the team recover from missed deadlines.
The headline experience appears similar. The underlying capability is not.
Interviewers often spend too much time verifying the visible facts and too little time examining how the candidate arrived at an outcome. They ask what happened, but not what changed. They ask what the candidate achieved, but not what alternatives were considered, what assumptions failed or what the person would do differently today.
Chess players study possible continuations. They consider how the position may develop after each move. Hiring teams should do something comparable by looking for evidence of trajectory.
Has the candidate taken on increasingly difficult problems? Do they learn from mistakes? Can they transfer knowledge from one environment to another? When the conditions changed, did their approach change too?
This is especially important because the skills required by businesses are moving quickly. The World Economic Forum reports that employers expect 39% of workers’ core skills to change by 2030. Analytical thinking remains the most widely valued core skill, while resilience, flexibility, leadership, creativity and curiosity also rank highly.
In that environment, hiring only for what a person already knows can leave a company perfectly staffed for yesterday.
Expertise Can Also Mislead You
Chess offers a warning as well as a lesson.
Deep experience helps experts recognise patterns quickly. It can also make familiar patterns difficult to ignore, even when a position contains something unusual. The mind sees what it has learned to expect.
Hiring managers face the same danger.
After several successful employees come from similar companies, schools or career paths, a manager may start treating that background as a formula. Soon, familiarity feels like evidence. Candidates who resemble previous high performers receive the benefit of the doubt, while less conventional applicants are asked to prove themselves repeatedly.
This is where intuition needs structure.
Research on hiring discretion has found that managers who overruled job-test recommendations often made worse hires on average, suggesting that experience alone does not protect decision-makers from bias or error. Other research on algorithmic recommendations shows a more complicated picture: most discretionary overrides reduced accuracy, but a small group of decision-makers improved on the algorithm by using relevant contextual information without overreacting to distracting details.
That small group is worth paying attention to.
The goal is not to remove human judgment from hiring. It is to improve the conditions under which judgment is used.
Structured interviews, clear evaluation criteria and work-related assessments prevent every interviewer from inventing a different definition of talent. Human judgment can then focus on the areas where context genuinely matters: the significance of a candidate’s choices, the difficulty of their environment, the quality of their reasoning and the potential hidden behind an unfamiliar career path.
Build a Position, Not a Collection of Stars
A chess player does not win by keeping the most powerful pieces on the board. The pieces must support one another and serve a coherent plan.
Companies sometimes forget this when hiring.
They pursue the “best” individual candidate without asking what the team actually needs. They hire another persuasive strategist when the organisation needs a disciplined operator. They add a senior specialist when the real problem is unclear ownership. They recruit people with identical strengths, then wonder why the team continues to share the same weaknesses.
A candidate can be exceptional and still be wrong for the position.
This is not an argument for the vague idea of “culture fit,” which can easily become a preference for people who think, speak and behave like those already inside the company. The more useful consideration is contribution.
What capability is missing? What perspective is absent? Where does the team repeatedly become stuck? What kind of person would make the people around them more effective?
On a chessboard, coordination often matters more than individual strength. In an organisation, the right hire changes the performance of the system around them.
Read the Whole Board
The deepest lesson from chess is not that grandmasters are always thinking many moves ahead. In fact, expertise often allows them to eliminate poor options quickly because they recognise the structure of the problem.
They know where to look.
That may be the real challenge in hiring today. Companies have more candidate information, more assessment tools and more technology than ever before. AI can search applications, identify keywords, summarise interviews and rank profiles. Yet more information does not automatically produce better judgment.
The hiring teams that improve will be those that learn to read beyond the obvious signals.
They will treat credentials as evidence rather than conclusions. They will distinguish a meaningful career pattern from a familiar-looking profile. They will examine how candidates think, learn and respond when the situation changes. They will use structure to challenge intuition and context to interpret what a score cannot explain.
Most importantly, they will stop asking only whether a candidate has made the right moves before.
They will ask whether this person understands the position well enough to make the right move next.
