# Stop filtering for compliance. Start recognizing capability.

Date: 2026-11-09

We spent years telling graduates to polish their CVs, tick every box, and trust the hiring funnel. Recently, I read a New York Times story about a 22-year-old biology graduate who applied for 511 jobs and counting. One of her rejections came from Whole Foods, right after an interview with a chatbot named Sage.


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To me, that is something every board should find hard to shrug off. A candidate can follow our playbook with extraordinary persistence and still meet a machine at the front door of a grocery role. A chatbot handles an application, but it has no idea what she can actually do.

That same week, I read a very different story in Fortune about Cisco. Padmanabhan Krishnamurthy, 27, co-founded EzDubs and joined Cisco through a 2025 acquisition with CEO experience already behind him. Yet the acquisition didn't give him a real mandate. He ended up buried five levels down doing unstrategic work. That changed when Jeetu Patel, Cisco's President and Chief Product Officer, found him. Krishnamurthy believed a two-person team could refactor the company's legacy code, so Patel gave him unlimited AI tokens, four weeks to prove his approach, and a goal of refactoring 98 percent of that code within 24 months.

The acquisition got a builder into the building, and the corporate structure immediately buried him. His capability only mattered when a leader looked past the org chart and gave him a real piece of work.

I see this all the time: buying a small startup is a great way to bring high-agency people past a broken public hiring funnel, but it doesn't automatically put them to work. If the founders sit five levels down, you bought a product and warehoused the talent. The real value of an acquihire comes from the second decision, handing them a real problem, a short clock, and an executive who backs their judgment.

The question I ask boards is simple: when persistence meets a chatbot at our front door, and when a builder is already sitting inside our walls, do we actually have a way to recognize either of them and give them work worth doing?

I advise companies on recruitment and talent strategy for a changing market.  [Contact me](https://goldmanmalka.com/about) me to arrange an on-site workshop for your board and leadership team.