Let me tell you
After twenty years of building Ergode, I’ve sat across from a lot of candidates.
And I’ll be honest with you. The thing that impresses me most in a hiring conversation is almost never the thing the candidate thinks is going to impress me.
It’s not the logos on the CV, though I look at them. It’s not the titles, though they tell me something. It’s not even the answers to the questions I ask, at least not in the way most people think. What I’m actually looking for, in every conversation, is evidence of depth. Evidence that this person has gone beyond the surface of something. That they’ve stayed with something long enough and gone deep enough to understand it in ways that can’t be picked up in a few months.
Let me tell you what depth looks like in practice.
The logos will get you
It’s the candidate who can tell me not just what they did in a role, but why certain decisions were made, what didn’t work and why, what they’d do differently now. It’s the person who has been around long enough in one place to see the consequences of their own decisions play out. Who has watched something succeed or fail because of a call they were part of making. That kind of experience is genuinely rare. And it shows up in the conversation in ways that are hard to fake.
What it looks like on a CV is often surprisingly simple. Someone who stayed somewhere for four or five years and did two or three different things within that time. Someone whose progression tells a story of growth rather than just a series of new beginnings. That CV tells me something important before the person has said a single word: that they know how to commit. That they can find new challenges without needing to change postcodes every eighteen months to find them.
Now I want to be clear about something. I’m not looking for someone who stayed somewhere out of fear or comfort. That’s a different thing and it shows up just as clearly in the conversation. The person who stayed somewhere for five years and learned nothing is not the person I’m describing. What I’m looking for is someone who stayed and grew. Who chose to go deeper rather than wider. Who built genuine expertise and genuine relationships rather than a collection of starting points.
The reason this matters so much to me is what I’ve seen happen inside Ergode over the years. The people who have built the most, who have had the most impact, who are genuinely irreplaceable in ways that have nothing to do with their title. Those are almost always the people who invested in being somewhere. Who accumulated context over time. Who earned trust not by being impressive in a first impression but by being consistently good over a long period. That kind of contribution is hard to quantify and even harder to replace. When I find someone who has built that somewhere else, I know they can build it here.
There’s a version of career ambition that is about collecting. New experiences, new companies, new titles, each one traded in for the next. And I understand the logic. It works for certain things. But there’s another version of ambition that is about building. Going somewhere, investing in it, understanding it deeply, and leaving it genuinely better than you found it. That version is quieter. It doesn’t generate as many LinkedIn announcements. But it produces something that the collecting version rarely does: people who actually know how to build something that lasts.
If you’re early in your career and reading this, here’s the most useful thing I can tell you. Find somewhere worth going deep in. Somewhere with good people, real problems, and room to grow. And then go deeper than you think you need to. The expertise you build, the trust you earn, the understanding you develop by staying with something long enough to really know it. That is what a career is actually made of.
The logos will get you in the room. What you built while you were there will keep you there.
Regards,
Rupesh
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