By Keiran Hathorn – Director, Big Wave Digital Recruitment

Coming back from a swim at Clovelly the other week, sun on the skin, no sharks spotted, which is always a bonus in Sydney these days, I had that rare post-ocean moment of clarity. Dinner was coming up, and for once, neither my wife Rach nor I were responsible.

Why? Because in our house, we’ve recently made a simple but radical shift: my two young adult daughters, Tibs and Rua, are now each cooking one night a week. That’s it. One meal. But the results have been sensationally surprising.

The Rules Are Simple. The Outcomes? Surprisingly Gourmet.

The new family cooking charter:

• Each kid cooks one night per week.
• They can cook whatever they like, just no pasta with cheese – the old fallback.
• They have to plan it, shop or forage for ingredients, and actually cook it.
• They can use YouTube, cookbooks, TikTok, go wild. But they’re the head chef.

Two weeks in and the results? Frankly, astonishing.

What does this story have to do with recruitment in Digital Marketing or Tech? I’m glad you asked as Tibs cooked Okonomiyaki, full Japanese Banquet style. Rua whipped up a delicious, tasty and healthy burrito bowl. Two meals we wouldn’t have thought of cooking ourselves, but voila, amazing and such a treat.

Surprise Is a Dish Best Served Often

It wasn’t just the flavours that got me. It was the fact they owned it, each in their own way. Tibs presented her meal with a story about learning to flip the pancakes without tearing them. Rua laughed while plating up, explaining her salsa-to-avocado ratio crisis. And honestly, it was one of those moments where I sat back, glass of wine in hand, and thought: this is what efficiency, maximum productivity and family bliss look like.

Recruitment—and leadership—could use a bit more of that.

Who Cares How the Job Gets Done, as Long as It’s Done Well?

In recruitment, we get focused on the details too much. We obsess over whether a developer has a Comp Sci degree, or if a growth marketer used a specific automation tool. Meanwhile, some of the best talent out there is quietly doing seriously good work, without ticking all the usual boxes.

In the same way I didn’t ask my kids to use a particular pan or stick to the family recipe, maybe it’s time we stopped asking candidates to match arbitrary and perhaps outdated job description matching or correlations. What matters is the outcome, the meal, not the method.

And the surprises? Well, let me tell you, they’ve been worth it. Rua pivoted with intention, swapping rice for roasted sweet potato, chickpeas and spice, and it turned into the best dish of the week.

Tibs, on the other hand, completely owned the Japanese banquet. She even made miso soup and carved little cucumber fans. No one asked her to. She just wanted to impress. And she did. The table went quiet when we took our first bites.

Think You Need a Front-End Dev with a CS Degree? Maybe Not.

We often get briefs that go like this:

“Must have a Bachelor’s in Computer Science. 3+ years React. Bonus if they’ve worked in fintech.”

But here’s the thing: I’ve met self-taught devs who’ve shipped better products than their paper-certified peers. I’ve met full-stack engineers who don’t just do front-end, they understand UX, think in systems, and debug like absolute pros. Some of them come from bootcamps, some from music production backgrounds, some from nowhere you’d expect.

One standout dev we placed last year had zero formal qualifications, but had built three fully functional SaaS apps from scratch. She’d learned through YouTube and Discord groups. When tested, she outranked 80% of other candidates. That’s the kind of polymathic genius that rigid job specs would reject outright.

Why does this matter? Because when you hire based on outcomes, not checklists, you get thinkers. You get people who adapt, solve, and deliver. Just like Tibs improvising a spicy version of Okonomiyaki with a side of pickled daikon because the shops were out of cabbage.

“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” — F. Scott Fitzgerald

In hiring? That’s knowing what excellence looks like and being open to how it’s achieved.

Performance Marketers, Side Hustles and Serendipity

Same goes for digital growth and performance marketers. We’ve placed candidates who’ve run $5m ad budgets without a single Google certification. They learned by doing. By testing, failing, and improving. One client told me their best hire last year was a marketer who came from running ads for his own side hustle, a surfboard brand he started from scratch. Now he’s optimising national campaigns.

Another client told us their new hire, a growth specialist, started out managing promo ads for her brother’s barbershop in Parramatta. She learned the ropes by boosting posts, watching conversion analytics like a hawk, and building scrappy funnels in Mailchimp. No degree. But she’s now driving ROAS up 47% quarter-on-quarter.

So I ask again: Why are we still recruiting based on credentials, not capability?

The Myth of the Perfect Resume: Is AI Resume Vetting Reinforcing Bias?

The obsession with degrees, certifications and cookie-cutter experience is outdated. Even more concerning, AI-driven resume vetting tools may be reinforcing systemic bias simply by the parameters or job description checklists they are trained on—especially if those prompts are too narrow, legacy-based, or reliant on keywords that disproportionately favour certain backgrounds.

Hiring based on static credentials is like expecting every meal to be meat and three veg. It’s functional, sure, but a little seriously boring.

There’s more than one way to skin a cat, or sear a steak, or deploy a React app.

Tech and marketing are evolving at a mercurial pace. What mattered in 2019 might be irrelevant now. We need epistemic humility, the awareness that we don’t know everything and that innovation often comes from unexpected places.

Diverse Paths Lead to Stronger Teams

McKinsey’s 2023 research showed companies in the top quartile for ethnic and cultural diversity on executive teams were 36% more likely to outperform on profitability. Harvard Business Review found that teams with cognitive diversity solve problems faster than teams made up of like-minded thinkers.

And it’s not just about where people come from, it’s about how they think. A recent Deloitte study found that inclusive teams outperform their peers by 80% in team-based assessments.

In our context? Hiring someone who came up through customer support before becoming a dev brings a completely different (and valuable) perspective to a team. It’s not just inclusive, it’s strategically smart.

“Discovery consists not in seeking new lands but in seeing with new eyes.” — Marcel Proust

The Kitchen Analogy Doesn’t Stop at the Stove

When Tibs made grilled haloumi tacos with mango salsa, she didn’t follow any family tradition. She Googled, she guessed, experimented and tested flavours. And it was delicious.

The point? Whether you’re writing code or cooking tacos, the path you take doesn’t matter if the result is excellent.

We need to stop hiring based on one accepted way of doing things. We should focus on problem-solving, outcomes, and originality. A polymathic growth hacker who’s also a musician might just crack your campaign better than the rigid MBA who’s never touched a real ad account.

We all get to the answer differently. Just like there’s more than one way to solve a maths problem, or feed a hungry family.

Hiring for Potential, Not Pedigree

Every now and then, we come across a hiring manager who says, “We’re only looking at candidates from the Big Four,” or “We want someone who’s done this exact role before.” To which I politely say: you might be cutting out your best future hire.

Sometimes the best software engineers are the ones who started out in tech support. Sometimes the best marketers are reformed journalists or artists or even hospitality workers who learned to sell an experience.

Hiring for potential means trusting that someone’s past trajectory isn’t the ceiling on their talent—it’s just the runway.

“The mind, once stretched by a new idea, never returns to its original dimensions.” — Oliver Wendell Holmes

A Pint at the Paddo and a Hiring Epiphany

A week ago, I was chatting with two mates over a beer at the Paddo Inn, our old stomping ground since we were 17, but let’s call it 18. One asked what I’d been working on lately. I told them about the shared cooking roster.

“Mate,” he said, “you should run your whole business like that.”

And he’s right. Give people freedom, trust their process, and the outcomes might just knock your socks off.

I’ve had candidates come through non-linear paths, failed startups, music school, even one who used to be a pastry chef, who are now brilliant devs or marketers. Why? Because they’ve had to think laterally, problem-solve, and operate without a safety net.

Here’s What I Think Matters in 2026 Hiring:

1. Flexibility over formula – great talent comes from unexpected places.
2. Outcomes over orthodoxy – prioritise results, not rigid processes.
3. Curiosity over credentials – hungry learners outperform safe hires.
4. Collaboration over cloning – diverse minds build stronger teams.
5. Autonomy over micromanagement – let people show you what they can really do.
6. Heuristics over perfectionism – fast feedback often beats endless planning.
7. Surprise over sameness – welcome the weird, the wildcard, the slightly unpolished.

And hey, if you’re a CTO still insisting every frontend hire have a degree from UNSW, I’ll eat my next rice paper roll with extra irony.

Final Word From the Home Kitchen

I never thought I’d get emotional over Okonomiyaki from a 19-year-old. But here we are.

It’s great to see your kids step up, own something, and surprise you with what they create.

And that’s what great hiring should feel like too.

Surprising. Energising. Nourishing.

Here’s to the next unexpected chef at home, and to the next standout candidate who shows us that outcomes matter more than process.

The future is bright, let’s go there together!

Cheers Keiran

Keiran Hathorn
Director, Big Wave Digital Recruitment
Sydney (with a belly full of mango tacos and metaphors)

 

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— Plato

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Big Wave Digital are experts in Digital Recruitment Sydney

At Big Wave Digital , Sydney’s leading digital, blockchain and technical recruitment agency, we have deep connections, experience and proven expertise, and the ability to achieve a win for all parties in the challenging recruiting process. We can connect to highly coveted digital and tech talent with the world’s best employers.

Keiran Hathorn is the CEO & Founder of Big Wave Digital. A Sydney based niche Digital, Blockchain & Technology recruitment company. Keiran leads a high performance, experienced recruitment team, assisting companies of all sizes secure the best talent.