TOP 3 FAILURES IN A C-LEVEL CANDIDATE INTERVIEW.
Bad advice on how to make a terrible impression on a senior executive.
Bad advice #1: Show up insecure. Otherwise, you risk making the person feel comfortable with you from the very first minutes. Tension during an interview is obvious almost instantly, on both sides. For a recruiter, a visibly uncomfortable executive can be a red flag: if a senior leader cannot relax even with HR, it is not entirely clear how they will handle difficult or conflict-heavy situations in the business. The reverse is also true: candidates respond much better to recruiters who are calm and confident.
What helps you feel confident (definitely don’t do this!)? The basics: get yourself into the right state. Take a few minutes to breathe before the interview. You can open Zoom on your own and try conducting the interview with the wall. Then watch the recording: you will immediately see where your voice starts shaking and where you start rambling. At first, you may look like a frightened little piglet.
Bad advice #2: Don’t understand the business. Deep preparation is for overachievers. Don’t read the news, don’t look at financial performance, don’t follow the blogs of senior industry leaders. The less you know about all that EBITDA stuff and current market pain points, the more boring the conversation will be for the executive. They will quickly realise that they have to explain their entire experience to you from scratch, they won’t open up, and you won’t have to torture them with interesting follow-up questions. Interview ruined, business card in the bin.
An example of the kind of conversation you must NEVER allow to happen in a truly terrible interview:
Candidate: “Before this, I was responsible for Business Unit X at Matrix.”
Recruiter: “I heard that Mr Anderson was leading that area at Matrix at the time and was implementing XYZ. Did you work on that together?”
And that’s it. The candidate is yours. They have just realised that they are not talking to a random recruiter reading from a checklist, but to someone who actually knows the key decision-makers in the market. Even if they are not right for the role, they may still give you a huge amount of useful information that can ultimately help you close the search.
Bad advice #3: Don’t study the role. There is absolutely no need to understand the business need in depth or ask the hiring manager too many questions. You do not need to know:
The perfect recipe for disaster: the candidate asks specific questions about their future role, while inside your head there is nothing but tumbleweed and a couple of notes in a Google Doc. “Better ask the hiring manager about the hiring goals,” “I can’t give you the numbers right now,” “There will be more information at the next stage, I’m mainly handling the organisational side” — classic lines from a failed interview.
Follow these simple recommendations and you will successfully make three mistakes that all lead to the same result: within a few minutes, a C-level candidate will realise that there is no point having a substantive, peer-level conversation with you.
Send us your own bad advice — we want to turn this into a full bingo card.
Bad advice on how to make a terrible impression on a senior executive.
Bad advice #1: Show up insecure. Otherwise, you risk making the person feel comfortable with you from the very first minutes. Tension during an interview is obvious almost instantly, on both sides. For a recruiter, a visibly uncomfortable executive can be a red flag: if a senior leader cannot relax even with HR, it is not entirely clear how they will handle difficult or conflict-heavy situations in the business. The reverse is also true: candidates respond much better to recruiters who are calm and confident.
What helps you feel confident (definitely don’t do this!)? The basics: get yourself into the right state. Take a few minutes to breathe before the interview. You can open Zoom on your own and try conducting the interview with the wall. Then watch the recording: you will immediately see where your voice starts shaking and where you start rambling. At first, you may look like a frightened little piglet.
Bad advice #2: Don’t understand the business. Deep preparation is for overachievers. Don’t read the news, don’t look at financial performance, don’t follow the blogs of senior industry leaders. The less you know about all that EBITDA stuff and current market pain points, the more boring the conversation will be for the executive. They will quickly realise that they have to explain their entire experience to you from scratch, they won’t open up, and you won’t have to torture them with interesting follow-up questions. Interview ruined, business card in the bin.
An example of the kind of conversation you must NEVER allow to happen in a truly terrible interview:
Candidate: “Before this, I was responsible for Business Unit X at Matrix.”
Recruiter: “I heard that Mr Anderson was leading that area at Matrix at the time and was implementing XYZ. Did you work on that together?”
And that’s it. The candidate is yours. They have just realised that they are not talking to a random recruiter reading from a checklist, but to someone who actually knows the key decision-makers in the market. Even if they are not right for the role, they may still give you a huge amount of useful information that can ultimately help you close the search.
Bad advice #3: Don’t study the role. There is absolutely no need to understand the business need in depth or ask the hiring manager too many questions. You do not need to know:
- what is currently happening with revenue;
- what the KPIs are;
- what the team looks like;
- whether it needs to be rebuilt;
- what condition the function is currently in;
- why this position exists in the first place.
The perfect recipe for disaster: the candidate asks specific questions about their future role, while inside your head there is nothing but tumbleweed and a couple of notes in a Google Doc. “Better ask the hiring manager about the hiring goals,” “I can’t give you the numbers right now,” “There will be more information at the next stage, I’m mainly handling the organisational side” — classic lines from a failed interview.
Follow these simple recommendations and you will successfully make three mistakes that all lead to the same result: within a few minutes, a C-level candidate will realise that there is no point having a substantive, peer-level conversation with you.
Send us your own bad advice — we want to turn this into a full bingo card.