Moving Cocoa: Recruit For The Future, Not The Past

After fifteen years of entrepreneurship, I recently made a deliberate choice to move into employment. Several reasons, but mostly these two things: I wanted a different life for myself, and I wanted to contribute to the cocoa and chocolate world in a different way, at a bigger scale, with a bigger team, with colleagues, inside an organisation working on something that genuinely matters. I am excited about that.

But the recruitment process that followed was, quite honestly, not what I expected.

I am not a junior. I have built and sold several companies, raised capital, set up new cocoa supply chains, led teams, created new products, launched multi-stakeholder projects, and closed large commercial contracts. And yet I kept running into the same quiet verdict: your profile is too risky. Not because of what I have done in my career, but how it looked on paper.

It is a pattern, and it points to something worth saying out loud. The cocoa and chocolate industry, like many traditional sectors, still runs on a risk-avoiding hiring logic that treats corporate pedigree as the primary signal of competence.

Fifteen years at Cargill reads as credible and respectable, but fifteen years building your own business, running your own P&L, raising capital, closing deals and delivering results without a safety net, somehow still gets you filtered out.

Not because the results are not there, but because they were achieved outside the system and, therefore, are somehow less credible. It led me to believe that companies are not hiring the best person for the job; they are hiring the safest option.

Affinity Bias

This is understandable. Research on affinity bias shows that we are naturally inclined to favour people who remind us of ourselves, in terms of background, experience, and way of thinking. To the hiring manager, it may not feel like bias; it feels like recognition, like finding someone who just gets it and will fit in perfectly. But what we are really doing, if we let this subconscious process lead the way, is recreating a room full of people we already have.

Over time, that becomes a self-reinforcing system where the same type of people hire the same type of people, and anyone who breaks that pattern has to work twice as hard just to get through the door.

AI Application Systems

AI is accelerating this. Application systems scan CVs for keywords derived from existing roles at familiar companies. If your experience does not match that exact language, your application likely lands in the rejection folder without any human having even seen it. Meanwhile, someone who has mastered the skill of using the right vocabulary could sail straight through, even if they lack the underlying depth.

The system optimises for recognition, but it should be looking at capability, ambition, skills, and job personality fit. Sure, I could play that game too. But I believe a genuine match between an employer and a candidate starts with honesty, not with learning how to game the system. And what does that system then build? A pipeline of people who act, look and think exactly like what already exists.

This problem is not new, but it is getting more consequential. Younger people do not expect to work patiently for 20+ years at the same company to climb the corporate ladder. They leave if there is no clear path forward or no real development. The result, across all levels and all generations, is the same: too many rooms filled with people who look and think alike.

The uncomfortable truth is that decades of sustainability programmes have not fundamentally improved farmers' lives. And right now, the context is getting harder, not easier. Price volatility at levels the sector has never seen before.

Climate disruption is no longer something in the future, but a present one, with floods and droughts immediately impacting supply chains and people's lives. Logistics costs are going through the roof.

Walking The Walk

The sector has no shortage of smart people who are good at building frameworks, models and convincing reports and presentations, but there is a fundamental difference between managing a problem and having implemented it yourself and seeing and hearing what works and what does not. The industry does lack people at the table who have actually walked the walk. When you consistently hire people trained to work within systems, you get solutions that are logical within the model but disconnected from reality outside it.

The cocoa sector is full of those. Well designed, well-intended, but also expensive and limited in impact.

And that starts with who you decide to hire.

Every hiring decision made right now shapes the organisation you are building for the future. Strong solutions require diverse teams, and diverse teams need to be built through deliberate choices and offering the right support.

So, next time you hire, take a good look at the room and ask yourself who is still missing. Are all the voices included in the right balance? And can these people actually make it through your application system without being filtered out? Make sure to test it. If you find the… outlier.

The future of this industry will not be built by people who tick all the boxes. It will be built by people who are brave enough to think outside of them. Always has been.

Marika van Santvoort has been working in cocoa & chocolate since 2014, with a focus on responsible sourcing, innovation and farmer impact. In this monthly column she shares her own perspective on what is really moving in the sector; what is being said, what is not, why it matters and what it means for the industry. LinkedIn · movingcocoa.com