The Well-Rounded Trap and Why a Safe CV Gets Forgotten
Daniele Forni is an executive coach for neurodivergent leaders and the founder of Squirrel Coach, based in Hong Kong. A former Director at HSBC with fifteen years in banking across Europe and Asia, he is a University of Cambridge alumnus and the author of books on leadership, neurodiversity, strategy, and meditation.
Picture this. It is Friday afternoon, and the sun is slowly setting behind the building across the street. You are exhausted by the week, and human resources (HR) has just sent you ten emails with the curricula vitae (CVs) they have shortlisted for the position you advertised. You sigh and prepare yourself for an hour of boredom, trying to work out which of them are worth meeting in person. You stand up, raise your desk, and get ready to fight whatever stands between you and a well-deserved weekend.
This scene is not invented. I lived it every year between January and April, when corporate (finally) opened the budget and allowed us to fill our slots for the year. For fifteen years in banking, I read a lot of CVs and sat on a lot of hiring panels. I noticed something that took me years to fully understand.
After the interviews, nobody ever summarised a candidate by listing their competencies. Nobody said, "Strong communicator, good analytical skills, collaborative." They said, "Oh, he helped a startup bootstrap its business development," or "He teaches martial arts at the weekend." Or, in a real case of someone I then hired, "He looked for sunken treasure in shipwrecks." One highlight, and it always came from a single strength that made that person different from everyone else in the pile.
The candidates who covered every base were rarely the ones we talked about. They were the ones we forgot.
The trap
Here is what most of us do when we write a CV. We ask artificial intelligence (AI) to read the job description, list every requirement, and make sure there is something on the page for each one, plus a generous helping of keywords for the applicant tracking system (ATS). Leadership: tick. Stakeholder management: tick. Analytical skills: tick. We try to be perfect for the job, and in doing so, we smooth out anything uneven, because uneven feels like a risk. We end up with a document on which nothing can be criticised and which will hopefully make it through the ominous HR filters.
That is exactly the problem. A CV on which nothing can be criticised is a CV on which nothing stands out. It is well-rounded, and well-rounded is another word for average.
I call it the well-rounded trap. It feels safe. However, it is the most expensive kind of safe there is, because it costs you the interview. Remember: getting through the filters is one thing, being picked for an interview is another.
Why panels remember peaks
There is a reason the brain works like this. In 1933, the German psychologist Hedwig von Restorff showed that when one item in a list is different from the rest, people remember it far better than the others. Psychologists still call it the isolation effect, or the von Restorff effect. A list of twelve similar words blurs, the one printed in red survives.
Researchers at Harvard Business School found something similar about people and called it the red sneakers effect. In the right setting, someone who deliberately breaks the dress code, like a professor lecturing in red trainers, is judged as having higher status and more competence, not less. Wear red sneakers to a black-tie event, and not only will people remember you, but many will also assume you can afford to be different.
A pile of CVs is a list. Most of them use the same words: results-driven, detail-oriented, team player, proven track record. No red words, no red sneakers. Yet the CV that survives the pile is the one with a single line printed in bold red.
The time people spend on each CV makes it even worse. I like to think I gave every CV three to five minutes. Recruiters screening hundreds do not: a widely quoted eye-tracking study by the job site Ladders found they spent an average of around seven seconds on an initial scan. You can argue about the exact number, and people do. But the principle holds: the top third of the first page decides whether the rest gets read.
In seven seconds, nobody can take in a well-rounded profile. They can only take in a peak.
Two shapes of CV
Picture two shapes. The first is a low, rounded hill: competent at everything, high at nothing. The second is a mountain range with one tall peak: uneven, with real valleys, and one strength that stands tall, towering over the landscape.
Most of us are told, from school onwards, to build hills. Fix your weaknesses. Do not fail any class. Fill the gaps. This is the recipe for becoming average, or, to use the polite word, well-rounded. But careers are not built on the average height of the range. They are built on the peak, because the peak is what people remember and what they hire for.
This matters even more if your mind does not come well-rounded in the first place. I am autistic and have attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and my own CV never looked well-rounded either. Many of the neurodivergent leaders I coach have what researchers call a spiky profile: very high in some abilities, lower in others. For years, they were told to sand down the spikes. On a CV, that advice is backward. The valleys are real, but the CV does not need to hide them. It needs to lead with the peak: something that stops the reader. The red sneakers.
A CV that could belong to anyone
When I teach this in my masterclasses, I use a sample CV I made up for the purpose: Alex Morgan, a vice president in credit risk in Hong Kong. Alex is fictional, but every line on the page is the kind of line I have read a thousand times.
The headline under the name says "Vice President, Risk and Finance". The summary reads: Results-driven finance professional with over 12 years of experience across risk management, financial planning and analysis, and business partnering in global banking. Strong analytical, leadership, and communication skills, with a proven track record of delivering high-quality work under tight deadlines. A collaborative team player who builds strong relationships with stakeholders at all levels.
Read it again and ask yourself: what is Alex for? You cannot say. Every adjective is a claim, and none of them is evidence. That summary could belong to ten thousand people.
But hidden in the Singapore role, in the fourth bullet of five, there is this: "Built a model in my own time that combined payment delays, covenant data and news flow to flag stressed clients, it identified two clients about six months before their downgrades, and the bank later adopted it across the region."
That is the only line on the whole page that nobody else could have written. In the London role, there is an echo of it: Alex was "the person the team went to when a spreadsheet or report broke".
Same strength, two roles, ten years apart. That is a spike, and it is buried.
What hiring managers can take from this
If you hire, the trap works on you too. When a pile of CVs all look competent, it is tempting to shortlist the ones with no gaps. That is how teams end up full of people who are fine at everything and remarkable at nothing!
Next time you read a pile, try reading for the spike instead of the gaps. Ask of each CV: what is the one thing this person would be the best in the room at? If you cannot find it, the problem may be the CV, not the candidate. Some of the strongest people I have worked with had the most unusual CVs, because they let them show what they really stood for. The treasure hunter was one of them.
Your ten minutes this week
You do not need a coach or a new template to start. You need ten minutes and a pen.
Write down three times someone came to you because you were the person for it.
Name what the three have in common, in one sentence.
Make that sentence the first line of your CV.
If you want a head start on naming your peak, the free Spiky Profile assessment maps your cognitive strengths in about ten minutes and gives you one of four leadership archetypes to build on. A well-rounded CV asks a panel to remember everything about you. A spiky CV asks them to remember one thing. Only one of those works.
So, what is the one line on your CV that nobody else could have written? How far down the page is it right now?
For more insights on recognising your strengths and navigating leadership as a neurodivergent professional, check out The Misfit Executive newsletter and The Data Shaman Podcast.
Read more from Daniele Forni
Daniele Forni, Executive Coach & Tech Founder
Daniele Forni, known as "The Data Shaman," is not your average executive coach. He helps senior professionals leverage their unconventional traits into tangible ROI using rigorous science, AI tools, and strategic wit. As the founder of the Squirrel Coach platform, he champions the "Spiky Profile" concept: exceptional leaders are defined by their peaks. An alumnus of the University of Cambridge and a 6x author on leadership, neurodiversity, and meditation, Daniele previously spent 15 years driving technology and risk management as an Investment Banking Director across Europe and Asia.
