I seem to be doing a lot of interviewing at the moment for clients. I guess that’s a logical follow-on from the senior team design work that I had going on earlier in the year.

I have to admit that interviewing for senior hires is one of the things I find hardest in my work, even though I’ve been doing it for a very long time.

Often I’ll be interviewing with a founder who usually is desperate for the person sitting on the call in front of us to be a good fit. All too often as soon as the candidate drops off the call, the founder says something like “yep, that’s the one.”

And I then have to walk them back from issuing an offer there and then. Because it’s where an almighty snafu is about to happen if we’re not careful.

What happens is the candidate shows all the right signs – I’m talking things like:

• Calm under pressure.
• Decisive.
• Saying all the right things about taking ownership when we asked about a project that had gone wrong.

My nervousness at this point in things comes from a realisation from some personal reflection I did before – looking back I’d realised that I’d interviewed two very different people over the years who had given pretty much those exact same answers.

One of them turned out to be decisive because they had the experience and the ego strength to make a hard call and live with it.

The other was decisive because doubt itself was something they couldn’t tolerate.

One was calm under pressure because they’d learned to regulate themselves. The other was calm because they’d learned, a long time ago, to stop feeling much at work at all (or maybe they never did – I’ll never get to know).

Basically both interviewed really well and I honestly don’t think I could have told the difference in the interview setting.

I read a piece recently by a psychotherapist called Kathleen Saxton, who spent twenty years as an executive headhunter in the first part of her career.

Her point grabbed me instantly as I read it: the typical language on a senior job spec – bold, decisive, resilient, “executive presence” – describes a real and healthy set of qualities.

It also happens to be the exact vocabulary that low empathy, ruthlessness and detachment show up as when someone’s good at managing how they come across. This took me straight back to my reflections on those two people I interviewed.

There’s a 2015 study, by a psychologist called Emily Grijalva, that keeps coming back to me. It found narcissism reliably predicts whether someone gets the senior job.

It has almost no relationship to whether they’re any good at it once they’re there.

To be honest, I’ve made this judgement error myself. As a COO I brought in someone who was unshakeable in every interview we ran him through (this was a senior BD hire, so one of the most tricky roles to interview for!).

Around four months in, two of his team told me in skip meetings they’d started looking elsewhere. I couldn’t work out why until in a session with my mentor we got a moment of clarity:

In leadership what actually matters is the reason sitting underneath the trait, not the trait itself.

That’s not going to show up in the best interview. An interview rewards whoever is best at being watched for an hour. For some senior candidates, being watched well is close to the whole of their professional skill (especially in business development).

The more senior the role, the more rehearsed that hour gets and the more expensive it is for founders to get wrong.

There’s a psychoanalyst called Manfred Kets de Vries who’s spent decades studying this. As I was researching this issue I found this great article.

One line of his has stuck with me: power is a heavy drug and a lot of people simply can’t handle it well. Nobody arrives at interview already drunk on it. That tends to come later, once the job is theirs and they’re in the door.

So as a founder what do you actually test for given that interview performance is precisely the thing that’s unreliable here?

Ask for the failure, not the philosophy of failure. Most senior candidates have a slick answer to “tell me about a time you were wrong.” Ask instead for a specific decision, then ask what they’d do differently now. Listen for whether the account has actually shifted since it happened or whether it’s just being told well. Don’t accept the first, second or even third thing they tell you – probe deeper each time.

Talk to someone who used to work for them not just someone they used to work for. A reference from a peer or a board tells you how this person manages up. You need to know how they treat someone with less power in the room than them, because that’s the version of them that your existing team will get.

Notice how they talk about the person who had the job before. This is a fave of mine. Being generous and specific is a good thing. A touch too dismissive or a touch too eager to explain why that person failed is an amber flag at best.

Build in a real check at three months as part of a defined onboarding process, not just a quick formality. Not a probation box tick with their new boss. Have an actual conversation with two or three people now reporting to them before the team has learned what to say and what to keep quiet. This is particularly important for UK businesses given upcoming employment law changes.

That last one matters more than it sounds like it should. Saxton’s piece cites research on toxic culture being ten times more powerful than pay in predicting who quits. By the time that shows up in your attrition numbers, the good people have usually already gone and you’re left dealing with the narcissistic leader who’s convinced everyone else is the issue.

Someone good at being watched passes a five stage interview process as easily as a one stage process. In fact I wonder if they pass it more easily as more stages just means more chances to make the right impression.

What actually helps is moving some of the judgement past the interview altogether, to a point where staying convincing gets harder.

I want to be clear – I don’t think this means treating every confident senior hire with suspicion. Most decisive people are decisive for the plain, healthy reason. But the interview will never tell you which reason you’re looking at and I think, if we’re really honest with ourselves, most of us hire as though it will.

A few questions I’d sit with before you embark on your next senior hire:

• If this person’s last team described them honestly, would it match the story they told you in the room?
• Who benefits from this person’s confidence and who has to absorb the impact of it?
• Would you make this same call again in six months once the interview version of them has worn off?

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