Hey Reader,

Fifteen years ago I hired someone who was perfect on paper. Every credential the role asked for, every year of background, every skill on the list.

Thirty days later I let them go.

Not for performance. They were getting results, which is what made the call hard. But those results came out of how they treated people, and we did not treat people that way.

The red flags were in the interview.

I ran the after action review on me, not on them. The signals had been sitting in that interview the whole time. I asked the questions that surfaced who this person was, I heard the answers, and I moved forward anyway.

I was blinded by the credentials. I was blinded by the need to fill the role. I was blinded by wanting someone in that seat so I could finally step out of it.

I was prioritizing comfort over culture.

You know that pressure if you have a seat open. It gets heavier every week it stays empty, your team absorbs the overflow, and the candidate who checks every box starts to look like relief instead of a decision. The pressure is real. The pressure doesn't make the call. You do.

What a résumé can't reach.

You can teach skill. Experience accumulates, judgment sharpens with reps and coaching, and most of what you screen for turns out to be coachable once somebody is inside your building.

What a person believes about other human beings does not work that way. Whether they hold service to others above service to self, at the level you're hiring for, is set long before they walk into your interview. You can't teach it, and neither can I. They have to choose it themselves, and if they won't, they won't succeed here.

A pedigree will never tell you that. Only behaviors and accountability will.

The question I ask now.

How do you measure success? What tells you, at the end of a day, that the day went well, that it was a good day?

Ask it, then stop talking. The answer is almost never about the metric, so listen for whether other people show up in it. Some candidates give you a number they hit. Some give you a problem they solved alone. Some give you a person on their team who got better because they were in the room.

You'll learn more in those thirty seconds than in an hour with their background.

Try this Monday: Ask it in your next interview. If you're not hiring, ask someone already on your leadership team and listen for who else shows up in the answer.

Then hit reply and tell me what you heard.

dusty

P.S. The hard part wasn't finding the red flags. It was admitting I never went looking until it cost me.

P.P.S. What this doesn't cover is reading someone already inside your building. Episode 47 breaks trust into three parts: relational, competency, integrity. Most of us only ever check the middle one.