Leadership Recruiting Knowledge Center
How to Evaluate Leadership Candidates Beyond the Résumé
By Mark Jones
Founder & Managing Director
How to Evaluate Leadership Candidates Beyond the Résumé
A strong résumé can get someone into the conversation. It shouldn’t get them the job.
That sounds obvious, but I’ve seen plenty of leadership searches where the résumé starts carrying too much weight. The candidate has the right titles. They’ve worked for recognizable companies. Their career progression looks good. Maybe they’ve even done something very similar to what the company needs.
All of that matters.
But it still doesn’t tell you whether they’re the right person to lead your organization.
The harder part of the leadership recruiting process starts after you’ve decided the résumé is good enough.
At a Glance
When I evaluate leadership candidates, I’m trying to get past titles and responsibilities and understand what the person actually accomplished.
That means looking at the decisions they made, the problems they inherited, the people they led, what changed because they were there, and how much of the result really belonged to them.
I also want to understand the environment where they were successful. A leader who performed well with a large team, established systems and plenty of resources may struggle in a smaller company where the infrastructure isn’t there yet.
The résumé gives you the background.
The conversations tell you the rest.
Start With What They Actually Did
Leadership résumés tend to be filled with words like led, managed, transformed, grew, and improved.
The problem is that those words can mean almost anything.
If a candidate says they grew a business by 30%, I want to know what was happening when they arrived. What did they change? What decisions did they personally make? Who else was involved? What resistance did they run into?
If they built a high-performing team, who did they hire? Who did they replace? How did they decide? What happened to the people who weren’t performing?
You usually learn much more from those answers than you do from the accomplishment itself.
Good candidates can explain what happened without turning every answer into a polished success story.
Separate the Person From the Company
This is one of the harder things to evaluate.
Sometimes a candidate has an impressive track record because they’re very good.
Sometimes they were working for a very good company.
Usually it’s some combination of both.
A sales leader who grew revenue while working for a market leader with a strong brand, an established sales organization and plenty of resources may have done an excellent job. But that doesn’t automatically mean that person can walk into a smaller company and build a sales organization from scratch.
The same issue comes up across functions.
A finance leader coming from a large public company may be excellent technically but accustomed to having specialists around them for everything. Put that person into a $100 million privately held company where the CFO is expected to get into the weeds, and it can be a very different job.
That’s why I spend a lot of time understanding the conditions behind a candidate’s success.
You’re not just hiring the track record.
You’re hiring the person who produced it.
Find Out How They Make Decisions
Leadership jobs are decision-making jobs.
Yet interviews often spend most of their time reviewing experience.
I’d rather hear about a difficult decision.
What information did the candidate have at the time? What options did they consider? Who disagreed with them? What did they decide? What happened?
And sometimes the most useful question is simply:
What would you do differently now?
You can learn quite a bit from the answer.
Someone who has been in leadership long enough has made bad calls. I’m more concerned about the candidate who can’t seem to remember one.
Listen for Specifics
I pay attention when candidates stay at 30,000 feet.
Strong leadership candidates can usually move easily between the big picture and the details.
If they tell me they improved margins, they should be able to explain where the improvement came from.
If they reorganized a department, they should be able to tell me why the old structure wasn’t working.
If they say they developed people, I want to hear about somebody they actually developed.
This doesn’t mean turning an interview into an interrogation.
It means staying with an answer long enough to understand it.
One of the simplest follow-up questions in recruiting is also one of the best:
“Tell me more about that.”
Then listen.
Pay Attention to How They Talk About People
This tells me a lot.
Leadership candidates eventually talk about former bosses, employees, peers or companies where things didn’t go well.
Listen to how they describe those situations.
Do they take any responsibility?
Can they disagree with someone without tearing them down?
When something failed, was it always because senior management wouldn’t listen, the team wasn’t good enough or the company didn’t give them the resources they needed?
There are legitimate bad situations. I’ve been recruiting long enough to know that.
But when every difficult situation is somebody else’s fault, I pay attention.
Look at the Environment, Not Just the Role
Two people can have the same title and be doing completely different jobs.
A VP of Operations in a 300-person family-owned manufacturer may need to be very hands-on. A VP of Operations at a large corporation may spend much more time managing through layers of leadership.
Neither is better.
They’re different.
The question is whether the candidate’s way of operating fits what your company actually needs.
This is where companies sometimes get distracted by pedigree. They see a candidate from a bigger or better-known company and assume they’re getting an upgrade.
Sometimes they are.
Sometimes they’re hiring someone who has never had to operate without the people, systems, budget and brand they’ve always had around them.
Don’t Confuse a Good Interview With Good Leadership
Some candidates are simply very good at interviewing.
They’re polished. They’re confident. They know how to tell their story. They build rapport quickly.
Those are useful skills, especially for certain leadership roles.
But they can also distort the evaluation.
I’ve also met strong candidates who weren’t especially polished in the first conversation. They needed a little time before you started seeing what they could really do.
That’s one reason I’m cautious about making a major decision based on chemistry.
You need chemistry.
You just don’t want chemistry making the decision for you.
Understand Why They’re Willing to Move
This matters even more when the search includes candidates who weren’t actively looking for another job.
Passive candidates usually aren’t leaving because they need work. Something has to make the opportunity worth considering.
Maybe they’ve gone as far as they can with their current company. Maybe ownership changed. Maybe they want more responsibility. Maybe they want to build something.
Whatever the reason, you need to understand it.
Because if the only thing pulling the candidate toward your opportunity is compensation, you may have a problem when their current employer makes a counteroffer.
I’ve seen that happen more than once.
The reason someone is willing to leave can tell you almost as much as the reason you want to hire them.
References Should Confirm What You Already Learned
I don’t view references as a box to check at the end of the process.
By that point, you should have a pretty good idea of the candidate’s strengths, weaknesses and leadership style.
References help test whether that picture is accurate.
Ask about the same things you explored during the interviews.
How did this person make decisions? What were they like under pressure? How did they handle people who disagreed with them? What kind of environment brought out their best work? Where did they need help?
You’re looking for consistency.
If the candidate described themselves one way and several people who worked closely with them describe something very different, that deserves another conversation.
A Recruiter's Perspective
One mistake I see companies make is deciding too early that they like someone.
Once that happens, the rest of the interview process can turn into an exercise in confirming the decision.
That’s dangerous in any hire. It’s particularly dangerous with leadership positions.
I try to keep asking myself the same question throughout a search:
What would make this person fail here?
Not because I’m looking for reasons to reject them.
I’m trying to understand the risk before the company makes the hire.
Every candidate has some.
The goal isn’t to find the leader with the perfect résumé or the perfect interview.
It’s to understand the person well enough to know what you’re actually hiring.
Key Takeaways
A résumé is useful for establishing whether a leadership candidate has relevant experience. It’s much less useful for determining whether that experience will translate into your organization.
Look behind the accomplishments. Understand what the candidate personally contributed and the environment in which they succeeded.
Pay attention to how candidates make decisions, talk about people, explain failures and describe their own role in past results.
Don’t let pedigree, chemistry or interview polish substitute for evidence.
And before you make the hire, ask the question that tends to get overlooked:
What could cause this person not to succeed here?
That answer may be more useful than another list of strengths.
Continue Learning
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