C-Suite Hiring: Seven Mistakes Companies Still Make

Selecting the right candidate for an executive role ranks high on the list of the most consequential organizational decisions. But despite employing the common tools of due diligence when assessing whether someone will perform well in the role, most companies’ predictive powers rank alongside astrology in reliability.

Organizations consistently make poor hiring decisions, but they rarely rethink their approaches. Despite advances in the fairness, validity, and reliability of candidate assessments, these haven’t proved very effective in predicting superior job performance.

Every selection decision is a prediction, but instead of ensuring those predictions are accurate, companies selecting leaders make easily correctable errors. Here are seven:

1. Selection Decisions Are Left to Chance

We met a CEO and founder who was nearing retirement. His company had enjoyed success due to an effective product mix and sparse competition. Recently, new players had captured a worrisome chunk of the market, and this organization now had to learn to play offense and defense.

The new circumstance required a change in leadership, yet the kind of agile leaders required were (and are) in short supply. The CEO knew what he wanted. “I just need a strong, firm handshake,” he said. ”I’ll know when I can see the whites of their eyes!” The CFO position he needed to fill remained vacant as he had hired and burned through two of his favored candidates within a year. We asked why they left. “They weren’t up to the job,” he explained, even though they both apparently had strong handshakes and made the right impression. This is a pattern of behavior we see all too often — selection decisions made on instinct and gut feeling.

Although this is an extreme example, consider the implications for your own organization’s selection methods. How many people are hired because they effectively wooed the interviewers? What biases are inherent in interviews that hinder an organization’s ability to be objective?

2. Face‑to‑Face Interviews Reward Likability

The biggest impediment we see to effective selection is an overreliance on face‑to‑face interviews, and almost every company uses them.

Simply put, face‑to‑face interviews are a waste of time unless they have a clear focus, use meaningful assessment criteria, and employ effective questioning. Likability in interviews has a disproportionate impact on how a candidate is weighed against others.