Perfect Interviews
Talking Heads
In all my years of hiring—and being hired—I’ve come to a rather sobering conclusion: the only undeniable truth about a great interview is that it was, indeed, a great interview. It tells you precisely nothing reliable about how the candidate will perform once they’re on the job. A charming, articulate, perfectly aligned conversation in a conference room or over Teams can feel like destiny, but it’s often just theatre—a momentary alignment of expectations, nerves, and performance.
I learned this lesson the hard way, or perhaps the fortunate way, during one particular recruitment drive. We were filling a key position on my team, and I interviewed four internal candidates. Two of them absolutely shone in their interviews. They answered every question with confidence, asked insightful follow-ups, and left me convinced that either one would be perfect. I was paralyzed by indecision, unable to choose between them. HR, ever practical, suggested a technical test to break the tie. Since they were all internal transfers, fairness dictated that we extend the test to all four original candidates.
When the results came back, I was stunned. The candidate who had delivered far and away the best performance on the test—the one who aced it—was the very same person who had stumbled through what I considered the weakest interview of the bunch. He had seemed hesitant, inarticulate, and frankly underwhelming in person. Yet the objective measure revealed his true capability. We hired him without hesitation, and he turned out to be one of the strongest performers I’ve ever had on my team. To this day, it was fortuitous that we hadn’t extended offers to the two “interview stars.” That experience cemented for me how dangerously misleading interviews alone can be.
Over time, I’ve observed what separates the interview champions from the rest. The real trick, if we’re being candid, lies in presentation and restraint. A sparse LinkedIn profile is gold: it gives you room to maneuver, to mirror exactly what the interviewer wants to hear without the risk of contradicting your own documented history. Fill it out too completely—every project, every role, every achievement—and you box yourself in. One stray detail from your past can torpedo the narrative you’re crafting in the moment. This leads me to a broader question: if a candidate’s LinkedIn profile is current, detailed, and comprehensive, why do we still demand a separate CV? Isn’t it largely a relic, a legacy habit from the days when résumés were printed on paper and profiles didn’t exist?
My own LinkedIn is the opposite of sparse. It’s a living archive: every significant project, publication, patent discussion, and even that morning prime-time TV interview I did with Gerry Elsdon—it’s all there, publicly accessible. Yet time and again, I’ve sat across from interviewers who clearly hadn’t glanced at it. They’d ask questions answered plainly on my profile, or miss connections that would have made the conversation far richer. Until the world catches up and treats LinkedIn as the primary source of truth it has become, I suppose I must continue to rely on delivering that “great interview.” But it does make me wonder: should I thin out my profile to play the game more effectively? The thought feels like a betrayal of transparency, yet the evidence suggests the game rewards opacity.
In the end, hiring based solely on the traditional interview—what I now call the Legacy Manner—is a recipe for disappointment. It prioritizes performance in a high-stakes, artificial setting over demonstrable skill, consistency, and real-world evidence. My anecdote with the four candidates isn’t unique; it’s a pattern I’ve seen repeated across industries. If we want better outcomes, we need better filters: tests, trials, references, portfolios—anything that pierces the illusion of the perfect conversation. Interviews have their place, but treating them as oracles of future performance is a folly we’ve clung to for far too long.