Experience brings answers. Humility keeps the questions.

There is something rather reassuring about experience.

Over the years, we recognise certain situations more quickly. We anticipate. We make connections. Sometimes we know, almost instinctively, that a decision deserves a little more thought.

Experience helps us move faster.

But I sometimes wonder whether it can also play tricks on us. The trick of believing that we know.

Because we have already encountered this situation. Because this career path reminds us of another. Because we have known this sector for fifteen years. Because “that's usually how it goes”.

After almost twenty years in recruitment, I have inevitably built up a few convictions.

I have also abandoned many of them.

And that is probably one of the lessons I find most interesting today.

I remember candidates whose background seemed almost obvious for a role and for whom, after an hour of conversation, it was far less so.

And the reverse, too.

CVs that would probably not have made it through certain traditional filters. A missing experience. An unusual career path. A transition hard to explain in a few lines.

Then comes the meeting.

One question leads to another. We understand why a decision was made at a particular moment. What looked like an inconsistency sometimes turns out to be proof of courage. An experience we thought secondary suddenly takes on much greater importance.

This obviously does not mean that intuition is always right, or that unconventional backgrounds are systematically better.

Simply that the first reading is not always the right one.

And this goes far beyond recruitment.

A manager may have a very precise idea of how a team member will react to a new responsibility.

A leader may be convinced that an organisation that has worked for ten years will keep working tomorrow.

A candidate may think that after fifteen years in the same profession, certain doors are now closed to them.

We all build certainties from what we have lived through.

It is human.

The risk perhaps begins when we stop questioning them.

It might seem strange after twenty years in the profession.

On the contrary, I see something rather precious in it.

Saying “I don't know” does not mean giving up on one's experience. It means accepting that past experience does not always allow us to understand a new situation immediately.

We must then come back to something very simple: asking a question.

Then truly listening to the answer.

This is perhaps where curiosity becomes a professional skill in its own right.

Not the curiosity of wanting to know everything.

The kind that pushes us to look at a situation we know very well as if something could still surprise us.

Or rather, it became accessible to everyone.

In a few seconds, we can now obtain an analysis, compare information, summarise a document, prepare an interview or challenge an idea.

Tomorrow, we will have even more data and probably better tools to interpret it.

I find this fascinating.

I use these tools a great deal myself.

But the faster our tools can give us answers, the more another ability may become precious: knowing which questions still deserve to be asked.

And above all, accepting that some answers are not immediate.

Because a person is not a sum of skills.

Because a company cannot be reduced to its organisation chart.

Because a career is not always coherent when you look back on it... and fortunately so.

Because some decisions still require a conversation.

I obviously know far more about my profession than on day one.

But I am probably also more aware of everything I do not know.

And in the end, I rather like that idea. Experience allows us to recognise. Curiosity compels us to look again.

Between the two lies perhaps the most interesting place: where we have learned enough to have an intuition, yet still have enough doubt to be willing to question it.