From the Diary of Carol Constant

What a board can see about two finalists once the CV and the interview stop telling them apart.

By the final round of an executive search, every candidate has the hard skills the job needs. The CVs are strong and the interviews went well. So the decision comes down to impression: who interviewed best, who felt most comfortable, who reminds the panel of someone who succeeded before.

Impression is getting harder to rely on. When the hiring platform Greenhouse surveyed more than 4,100 job seekers, recruiters and hiring managers in 2025, 74 percent of US job seekers said they use AI themselves, and 65 percent of US hiring managers said they had caught applicants using it deceptively.

Carol Constant makes the same point in two sentences. “CVs have lost meaning: they are written by AI and screened by AI,” she says. “Interviews are a sales pitch, also helped by AI.”

Carol is the founder and CEO of WhomLab, a human resources consultancy with headquarters in Prague and Lausanne, and her answer is to add a third kind of evidence to the two a board already has. Candidates, or the members of an existing team, play about 30 minutes of visual games. What they do in the games shows how they make decisions, handle risk and work with others. WhomLab turns that into a decision-making style profile for each person, and then into what Carol calls a “team map” of how the whole team fits together.

“It lets boards and HR leaders hire on evidence rather than impression,” she says, “and build teams that are balanced by design instead of by chance.”

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Two finalists, one seat

The clearest picture of what the map does is a search Carol describes. WhomLab helped an executive team choose between two final candidates. One was decisive and a risk taker. The other was analytical and risk averse. WhomLab built a team map for each of them, showing what the team would look like with that person in it.

The map showed that the existing members were already fast-moving and comfortable with risk. “Another risk taker would have meant fewer checks on big decisions,” Carol says.

The team hired the analytical candidate, and “he was the perfect fit for that moment,” she says. “He stress-tested ideas before the team committed to them, which helped avoid costly mistakes without losing momentum.”

“The question shifted from ‘who impressed us most?’ to ‘who completes this team?’”

Carol Constant, Founder & CEO, WhomLab

The first question suits the people being asked it. “Executives are typically good communicators and great in interviews,” Carol says, “but that doesn’t always mean they are the right fit for the team.” Her summary is one line: “Brilliant people don’t always make brilliant teams; teams need balance.” And because executive teams are small, she adds, “one person can make or break the dynamics.”

The map itself starts with something that, for the person doing it, feels more like a game than a test.

Thirty minutes of visual games

Candidates or existing team members play for about half an hour. “There are no better or worse answers, so it’s hard to fake,” Carol says. Hard to fake is the point she returns to. Behavioral data, she says, “shows how a person actually thinks, decides and works with others, and it’s much harder to fake or polish.”

What comes out has two layers. The first is a profile of each person’s decision-making style. The second is the team map, which shows, in her words, “where it’s balanced, where it’s overloaded, and what’s missing.”

In Carol’s description, WhomLab complements CVs and interviews. For the people hiring, she says, “it adds evidence to the CV and interview.” The evidence it adds is about something the other two don’t cover.

“All the candidates usually have the hard skills the job needs. What makes the difference is team fit: how each person will work with the people around them.”

Carol, Founder & CEO, WhomLab

She learned to look there inside corporate HR.

What she saw from inside

Carol’s background is in learning and development and human resources. She has worked for Fortune 500 companies in six countries on three continents, and as she puts it on her profile, “Across industries and cultures, the same challenges remain at senior levels: misaligned executive teams, disengagement, and costly leadership conflict.”

What those years taught her, she says, is that people don’t stay or leave a company because of the tasks or the job. “They stay or leave because of the people they work with.”

“I saw it again and again,” she says. The final decision gets made on impression, and “nobody asks how the new person will work with the rest of the team.” Then, months later, someone resigns, “and it gets explained as a bad fit with the role, a communication issue or a personality clash.”

“An outside consultant usually only sees the result. Inside, you see the moment it was set in motion, and you see that the real cause was never the job.”

Carol, Founder & CEO, WhomLab

The pattern she describes shows up in research on senior appointments. A McKinsey review published in 2018 reported that two years after an executive transition, between 27 and 46 percent are regarded as failures or disappointments, and that 68 percent of transitions run into trouble over politics, culture and people.

Carol founded WhomLab in 2022. “That’s why I built my work around adding behavioral data to that moment,” she says, “so the decision isn’t made on impression alone, and people end up working with the right people.”

One of the things that shaped how she thinks about hiring happened when she was eight.

The people around the table

“The first time I fired someone I was eight, my mum had asked me to, and I still remember the shock on that person’s face,” Carol says. “That experience changed how I think about hiring and firing.”

The other influence she names is someone she reported to. “The best leader I worked for made everyone around her better,” she says, “and it taught me that team results come from the people around the table, not from one star.”

She says she was called the queen of follow-up, and she explains the title plainly: “If I start something, I finish it, because most good ideas fail in the follow-through, not in the thinking.”

Which brings the story to what WhomLab has finished and what it hasn’t.

Where WhomLab stands

“Our team map is ready and our platform is being developed so we can scale,” Carol says. So far WhomLab has worked with small teams, with what she describes as excellent results, with organizations including British Telecom and Omya.

WhomLab won the Technology and Innovation Award at AIMS London 2025. It has won three projects funded by the European Commission and one funded by Innosuisse in Switzerland, where the company has opened a new branch.

The main focus now, she says, is “giving our models even more scientific validation, through a project with HEIG University in Lausanne, Switzerland.”

Where Carol Is Now

This year’s work has run on two tracks. One is the product: the platform being developed, the Swiss branch and the validation project.

The other is public. Carol is an EU Expert with the European Commission and a board member at TechLabs, and WhomLab led EU Women Leaders 2026. The program, co-financed by the European Commission, was built to prepare senior women for executive and board roles and to support the implementation of the EU Women on Boards Directive. It drew more than 1,500 applications for 20 places, she wrote when the cohort was announced, and that first cohort has now graduated. WhomLab’s own work on leadership teams and boards carries a strong focus on female executives and board members.

The readers she most wants for this piece are corporate boards and HR leaders, and what she wants from them is recognition for the approach itself, a shift “from judging who presents best to understanding who fits, and who makes the team stronger.”

Outside work, she has kept moving. “I’ve traveled to almost 80 countries and lived and worked in six,” she says, “which gave me a good feel for how differently people think, decide and work together.”

Asked what is next, she gives one sentence: “I want every leader to start a new job knowing exactly how they fit with the people around them.”

Five Lines from Carol’s Diary

“Brilliant people don’t always make brilliant teams; teams need balance.”
“They stay or leave because of the people they work with.”
“There are no better or worse answers, so it’s hard to fake.”
“For the person playing, it feels much more like a game than a test.”
“WhomLab shows who would make the team stronger.”