Their Answers Were Perfect. That's the Problem.

AI has leveled the content of interview answers, so the words alone won't tell you who you're hiring. The signal that still works is delivery: what changes in a candidate's voice and body when the questions get harder.

Layoffs, reorgs, acquisitions, restructuring. Over the past few months an unusual number of both new and existing clients have asked to spend their sessions on interviewing.

They're on both sides of the desk. Some are hiring, backfilling roles that emptied out overnight. Others are the candidates, going for a mid-year promotion or deciding the greener pasture is somewhere else. 

Any organizational executive will tell you that the stakes of hiring the wrong person – especially a toxic personality – into a leadership position are astronomically high. 

But it’s hard to weed the wrong person out because they’ve all leveraged the same tools (*ahem–AI*), to predict the questions they’d have to answer and practiced those answers to a T.

So when everyone has similarly polished stock answers, how can you be sure the persona you meet before the contracts are signed is the same person you’ll be working with once the ink is dry?

The article that gets the content right

So I was glad to see the recent Harvard Business Review piece, How to Spot a Toxic Leader Before Hiring Them, by Douglas H. Reynolds and Steven G. Rogelberg.

The premise is uncomfortable and correct: People with toxic interpersonal patterns often interview beautifully, because what initially comes across as charisma may be the very traits that wreck a team once the honeymoon period is over.

So what’s the remedy?

The authors' share a great tactic of a different trajectory of questions, specifically questions that force them to take ownership of something that didn’t go according to plan, or to give credit for something to others, e.g.: 

• Describe a project that you were part of that failed. What was your specific contribution to that failure?

• Tell me about someone who disagreed with your approach. How did that play out?

• Walk me through how you developed an associate in your last role.

• Describe a time a team member disagreed with you, and they turned out to be right. How did you handle the situation?

These are great questions. Check out the HBR article for what makes these questions powerful, what a strong answer contains and what a red flag sounds like. It's great for that. 

But here's what it doesn't cover, and it’s every bit as mission-critical to help you ascertain when a technically-exceptional candidate might be someone to avoid.

The words are the cheap part now

The challenge is that, content-wise, AI can help every candidate you interview generate a polished answer to any question–even the four above. Relevant answers are table stakes for anyone who bothered putting five minutes of work in with ChatGPT as part of their interview prep.

But the way they deliver those answers is a treasure trove of intel.

I put it this way on The Academic Boardroom podcast recently: 

• the words are the foundation of the house
• and the delivery is the walls and the ceiling. 

That article pours an excellent foundation… but nobody lives on a foundation alone.

The entire premise of my book, Speaking to Influence: Mastering Your Leadership Voice, is that authentic executive presence shows up in the congruent alignment of the verbal, the vocal and the visual, i.e. your words, voice, and body language. 

When all three agree, you believe the speaker. When they don't, your instinct trusts the delivery, whether or not you can explain why. 

The beauty is that that's the part nobody can pre-generate, and it's the part most interviewers register without ever writing down. A signal you can't name is one you'll either over-trust or ignore completely, depending on which is more convenient that day.

So let's look at how to name it.

The Baseline Read

Spend the first ten minutes on the easy material – like the confidence-boosting success stories: 

• The resume walk
• the vision for the role
• the wins. 

You're not strictly evaluating yet… You're calibrating. That's your baseline: how this particular person sounds and looks when in their content comfort zone.

Then shift gears, and ask the hard four questions above, and watch what changes. The key leadership signals are in the delta.

I repeat: The behavior itself is never the signal; the change is. 

For example, a nervous candidate is likely nervous the whole time, and someone raised where claiming any credit is impolite will be modest throughout. Neither one gives you a delta. 

But the candidate whose entire manner suddenly shifts the minute you ask what he contributed to a failure has just told you something extremely important.

Let’s break it down with a few examples, channel by channel.

What to listen for: The Vocal Channel

• The disfluency spike. Is he clean and fluent through the success stories and vision, then does he suddenly shift to “um, well, I mean, so, the thing is…”? The issue isn't that he uses some fillers. It's when he starts.
• Tonality shift. Maybe the voice is animated and engaging during those success stories, but then during the “lessons learned” questions the energy disappears, the pitch flattens, the voice settles into a creak as he races to get it over with. Constant creaking or “vocal fry” is a speaking style (like it or not). A creak that suddenly shows up is a signal.
• How he voices the person who disagreed with him. Listen for the mocking register, the little vocal eye-roll while quoting someone who isn't in the room to defend himself. Contempt is very hard to keep out of the voice.

What to look for: The Visual Channel

• The fold and the re-cross. Arms fold, legs recross, frequent fidgeting… the open posture that was there ten minutes ago is replaced by defensive fight-or-flight posture.
• The gaze shift. They made eye contact before, but now suddenly it’s much less frequent. This tells you that the load just went up. Something about that question got harder. You don't know what, and that's exactly the point.
• The whole encounter. Watch how he treats the most junior person on the panel, and whoever walked him in. The article tells you to ask about the wake a candidate leaves behind. The whole interview is a wake.

Why this holds up

Here's what makes it worth the effort: a candidate can't rehearse the delta away. He can polish every answer he expects and his voice will still find the sentence he hasn't made peace with. Preparation raises the floor on content. It does almost nothing to delivery, and delivery is where the person actually is.

(Which, if you happen to be reading this from the other side of the desk — i.e. you’re interviewing for a new role yourself – you should take as insider information.)

That's how you ensure that the right person gets the job.

Frequently asked questions

How can you tell if a job candidate is being dishonest in an interview?

You usually can't, and trying to is where most interviewers go wrong. No single cue reveals dishonesty, and popular tells like gaze aversion have been repeatedly debunked. What you can observe is a change in how someone speaks and carries themselves when a question gets harder, which tells you to ask a follow-up rather than to reach a conclusion.

What is the best way to spot a toxic leader during the hiring process?

Ask behavioral questions about failure, disagreement and developing others, then evaluate both the content of the answer and its delivery. Establish how the candidate sounds when they're comfortable, then watch what changes. Score interpersonal capability separately from technical skill, and weight it at least equally for leadership roles.

Can you still read a candidate who prepared their answers with AI?

Yes, and that's the point. AI makes the content of interview answers uniformly strong, so a polished answer no longer distinguishes anyone. What it can't rehearse is delivery. Voice and body still shift when a question touches something the candidate hasn't resolved, no matter how well the words were prepared.

What is executive presence in an interview?

Executive presence is the congruent alignment of your verbal, vocal and visual communication. Your words, your voice and your body language all say the same thing at the same time. When they conflict, listeners believe the delivery over the words, usually without being able to explain why they did.