Irregular Relationships: The Hiring Signal Most South African Panels Miss

A well known US chief executive has spoken about a personal hiring compass: he looks for people with what he calls irregular relationships. Friends, mentors or collaborators who are nothing like them. Different background, different politics, different industry, different way of seeing the world.

His logic is simple. If someone can build a genuine, lasting relationship with someone unlike themselves, that is real evidence of elasticity. Of the ability to listen, adapt and work across difference rather than just talk about it in an interview.

For South African employers, this is worth sitting with. We are, by definition, a country of irregular relationships. Our workforces, our client bases and our teams are diverse by necessity, not by design. Yet most shortlists are still built on tidy proxies: the right degree, the right previous employer, the right years of experience. Few panels ask who a candidate actually spends time with, learns from or has been challenged by.

What the signal actually looks like

This is not about ticking a diversity box on a CV. It is about noticing patterns in how someone describes their working life and their relationships. In practice, it shows up as:

• A mentor or sponsor from a very different generation, background or discipline, not just a senior version of themselves.
• Long standing working relationships with people who hold different views, whether political, technical or cultural, and can explain what they have learned from the friction.
• Cross functional friendships at work: the finance director who is genuinely close to someone on the shop floor or in the call centre.
• A track record of seeking out collaborators who complement rather than mirror their own strengths.
• An ability to talk about a disagreement with someone unlike them without turning it into a story about being right.

None of this appears reliably on a CV. It surfaces in conversation, in the small asides candidates make when they talk about people who shaped them, and in how they answer questions they were not obviously prepped for.

Why it matters for specialist and management roles

For specialist roles, irregular relationships often predict how well someone will work with people who do not share their technical language. An engineer who has spent years explaining complex ideas to non technical colleagues, family members or community groups tends to translate better inside a business too.

For management roles, the stakes are higher. A manager who has only ever built relationships with people similar to themselves is a real risk in a South African team. They may struggle to earn trust across language, generation or background, and that struggle usually shows up first in retention and morale, quietly, long before it shows up in performance numbers.

This is also relevant to client facing roles. If your client base is diverse, and in South Africa it almost always is, you want people on the front line who have proven, lived experience of building trust across difference. Not people who can recite the values on your careers page.

Building it into shortlist criteria

We are not suggesting panels interrogate candidates' personal lives. That is neither appropriate nor useful. But shortlist criteria can be widened sensibly:

• Ask about a mentor or collaborator who challenged the candidate's thinking, and what changed as a result.
• Ask for an example of a working relationship that started with real difference or disagreement and became productive.
• Listen for how candidates describe people unlike themselves. Respect and curiosity are good signs. Flattening people into stereotypes is not.
• Notice whether examples are recent and specific, or vague and long in the past.

Why this needs a real conversation, not a profile scan

This is precisely the kind of signal a LinkedIn profile cannot give you. A CV lists employers and titles. It does not tell you who challenged someone's thinking, or how they handled being the outsider in a room.

It is why every shortlist we put in front of a client at The Appointment Firm has been interviewed in person by a partner first. We are not scanning keywords or inferring character from a profile photo and a job history. We are sitting across a table, asking the follow up question, and listening for what a candidate says about the people who shaped them.

In a country as layered as South Africa, that is not a nice to have. It is one of the clearest predictors we have of whether someone will actually thrive in your business, not just look good on paper.

If you are making a specialist or management appointment and want a shortlist that has been properly tested for this kind of elasticity, we would welcome the conversation. Get in touch with The Appointment Firm and let us talk through what you are really looking for.