A Very Good TA Convo #17 with Samar Morshedi: Ditch the CV, Show Us What You Got

Hiring is everyone's job

When asked what she believes about recruitment that most people would disagree with, Samar didn't hesitate: talent acquisition shouldn't live only with the TA team. At Bunq, everyone in the company is on the lookout for great talent. The TA team's role is to facilitate, to train people on sourcing, interviewing, and objective evaluation. But the actual responsibility of finding good people? That's shared across the entire organization.

"You're a team member. You know there's a problem in your team that needs to be solved. Do you know someone from your network? Let's make that connection."

From commercial leader to head of recruitment

Samar doesn't have a traditional recruitment background. She was Head of Commercial and Customer Success at a recruitment tech startup, helping TA teams audit their automations and efficiency. When Bunq reached out looking for a new head of recruitment with a commercial background, it clicked. The overlap between managing clients and managing hiring stakeholders turned out to be bigger than most people would expect.

She went through Bunq's own hiring process, including the infamous "Get Shit Done" day, and fell in love with the challenge. It's a living example of what she now preaches: drive, passion, and the ability to learn matter more than what's on your CV.

The Get Shit Done day

Bunq hasn't asked for CVs in years. Their entire recruitment process is skill-based. Candidates go through online assessments, interviews, and then the final stage: the Get Shit Done day. For some leadership roles, it's even two days.

"Candidates come to the office for one day and they work on challenges related to the role. Real challenges that we are facing today. You think you're the right person. We think you're the right person. Show us what you got."

The philosophy is straightforward. There's a problem. Can you solve it? Then it's yours. Can you solve a more complex one? That one's yours too. That's how Bunq looks at talent: not through the lens of job titles or career paths, but through the ability to get things done.

And it works both ways. The day gives candidates a real sense of what working at Bunq actually feels like. Not everyone says yes after experiencing it, and that's completely fine. Every step in the process is a chance for both sides to figure out if it's a fit.

If your team gets cut, enable the whole company

When asked what she'd do if told to cut her team by half while doubling hiring goals, Samar's answer tied right back to her core belief. She'd enable everyone in the company to be a good recruiter. How to find people, how to source, how to use the latest technology, how to run good interviews, how to evaluate objectively.

"The job needs to be done. If our team gets smaller, how can we enable the rest of the company to actually do the job? Because we need people anyway."

This isn't theoretical at Bunq. They already run a hiring OKR each quarter where people across the company get trained on sourcing, building agents for sourcing, and conducting interviews. It's recruitment as an organizational capability, not just a department.

Hire for potential, not for the CV

Samar sees too many companies making things unnecessarily complicated while missing the basics. Before going to market, understand what the job actually is. What problem needs to be solved? She hears from friends who get hired for roles that have nothing to do with what they were told during the interview process. That disconnect starts with a lack of clarity on what's actually needed.

The second thing she pushes back on is the obsession with matching career paths. Bunq's own head of product did a Get Shit Done day for a CFO role and ended up being redirected to head of product instead. Samar herself was hired as a non-recruiter to lead recruitment. Two of her newest talent partners came from Bunq's operations team with zero recruitment experience but four years of deep company knowledge.

"What is the potential this person has? Not exactly what they're bringing to the table today. I think keeping an open mind and staying curious about that makes all the difference."

Bunq regularly has conversations with people where there's no specific role in mind. They know what problems exist internally, they meet the person, and if there's a match, they create the opportunity. The role might not even exist yet.

CV matching with AI? Bullshit.

When asked what's the biggest bullshit in recruitment, Samar didn't hold back. AI-powered CV matching. "What are we matching here? We're matching someone's ChatGPT with our... I don't know. It's just no."

If the CV itself is unreliable, and especially now when candidates aren't even writing them themselves, then building technology to match those CVs is solving the wrong problem entirely.

Her advice to leaders who want to move beyond CV matching: start with one role. Define the five things you want that person to actually do. Then figure out ways to assess those things that don't involve reading a resume. "There's nowhere in the resume that you can find if someone has the right mindset or attitude. So find other ways to let them show you."

Measure everything, prove your value

Bunq is obsessively data-driven, and that extends to recruitment. They track which channels bring the best quality, the quality of sourced versus organic candidates, and the performance of every hire through quarterly reviews. When leadership asks what value TA brings, Samar has dashboards and data to back it up.

They also close the loop on bad hires. Every unsuccessful hiring decision gets analyzed: what was the evaluation during recruitment, what happened during onboarding, where were the discrepancies? Those insights feed directly back into improving the process.

"People get started and then every three months we have performance reviews. So there is an objective way of assessing the quality of what we brought to the table and showing the value of it for the company."

Transparency over employer branding

The most memorable hiring mistakes at Bunq weren't about skills. They were about expectations. People who loved the idea of ownership, fast pace, and working outside their comfort zone, but found the reality different from what they imagined. At Bunq, you own the outcome. If it's good, you get the recognition. If it's not, you're still held accountable. That's not for everyone.

Samar's takeaway: it's her job to paint a transparent picture of what working at Bunq really means. All the cool stuff, but also all the challenges. "If it's not a fit, that's completely fine. But let's figure that out before you start, not after."

The office that shuffles every four weeks

One of Bunq's most distinctive rituals: every four weeks, everyone in the Amsterdam office gets reshuffled to sit with a completely different group of people. The idea is simple. You're growing fast, new people are joining constantly, and if you only sit with your own team, you never get different perspectives on your challenges.

"If I'm working on a challenge and sitting next to someone from the backend team, they can give me a perspective I don't have. For recruitment especially, it's incredibly important to know what's happening across the company."

Advice for young recruiters

Stay curious. You're going to work with people, and there's always so much you don't know about them. Ask questions, try to understand underlying motivations. Don't over-structure everything. Sometimes look at the version of the person in front of you that isn't today but that you can help them become. That version might end up doing incredible things.

The takeaway

Samar's approach to recruitment at Bunq is a challenge to the entire industry. Ditch the CVs. Stop matching documents that nobody even writes themselves anymore. Instead, give people real problems and watch how they solve them. Make hiring a company-wide responsibility. Measure everything so you can prove your value with data, not opinions. And stay radically transparent about what it actually means to work at your company, because a great candidate experience isn't about making things look good. It's about making sure both sides know exactly what they're getting into.