Berlin's new Chief Digital Officer, and a CV lesson
Florian Hauer has taken over as Berlin's Chief Digital Officer after Matthias Hundt asked to be dismissed amid reporting on his track record. A short note on what the episode says about verifying a CV.
Berlin has a new Chief Digital Officer. Florian Hauer, until now the city's State Secretary for Federal and European Affairs, has taken over the role after Matthias Hundt asked to be dismissed and Governing Mayor Kai Wegner approved the request.
Hundt had only held the post since March, when Wegner appointed him to replace Martina Klement. According to reporting by Berliner Zeitung, later picked up by The Berliner, questions had been raised about the accuracy of parts of Hundt's CV. Hundt himself described the coverage as a media campaign against him. The same reporting referenced a Dresden public prosecutor's investigation into the insolvency of a company he had previously been involved with. I am summarising what those outlets reported. I have not independently verified the claims, and Hundt left at his own request rather than through any formal finding against him.
The part a job board cares about
Set the politics aside. What is left is a hiring story, and a familiar one.
A senior role was reportedly filled on the strength of a CV that, by those accounts, did not hold up to a close read. Berliner Zeitung pointed to a lectureship listed as lasting several years that it says ran for under one, and to a past directorship at a company that later went bankrupt, which the CV did not mention at all. The detail that sticks with me is the simplest: the supporting documents were, by those accounts, never asked for.
That is the whole lesson. Not that one appointment went wrong, but that it went wrong in the ordinary way. A polished network and a confident pitch, and no one checking the paper underneath.
If you hire, the fix is boring and it works. Ask for the documents. Call the references and ask real questions, not just dates. Treat a polished profile as a claim to be checked, not as a fact already settled. The candidates worth having will not blink at any of it.
And if you are the one being hired, assume someone will verify, and make sure everything on your CV survives it. The strongest record is the one that gets stronger the harder it is checked.
This is the unglamorous backbone of hiring at every company on my allowlist, and it reads the same on both sides of the table. Berlin just got a very public reminder of what happens when it gets skipped.