Raising the Bar on Interviewing: How to Hire for Fit, Skills, and Company Success

This is a follow-on to the newsletter I published a few weeks ago titled, “Why Culture is Every Company’s Hidden Performance Engine and How Performance Intelligence Makes it Real”.

When it comes to building a winning company, everyone talks about product innovation and growth strategy. But anyone who’s lived inside the real trenches knows: an organization is only as good as the people on its team and its culture. As I wrote in my first book,  “Traversing the Traction Gap”, nothing you do is more important than hiring—and the way you interview is where most of the heavy lifting (and costly mistakes) occurs.

Why Interviewing Is the Highest-Stakes Game

The statistics are stark: according to SHRM, a bad hire can cost up to five times that person’s salary. Glassdoor’s research shows that 95% of companies admit to mis-hiring every year. In startups and early-stage growth companies, failure to hire and integrate the right people doesn’t just create hassle, it can be fatal. For mature companies, a mis-hire may not be fatal but it can lead to legal and financial exposure from “toxic behavior”, a diaspora of employees leaving for “better pastures”, and poor company ratings on sites such as Glassdoor and others.

So why is the interview process so error-prone? And what can be done about it?

Two Lines of Truth in Interviewing

Here’s the essence from my book, Traversing the Traction Gap:

“You can reliably pursue only two lines of questioning to determine whether someone is the right choice:

1   Is the person truly skilled in the function for which he/she is interviewing?

2   Will this person fit into the culture of the company?”

All the rest (e.g., résumé gloss, feel-good banter, generic personality quizzes) amounts to noise unless you can nail these two fundamentals.

Functional Skill: Have your top practitioners, actual experts in the discipline, design the questions and (where appropriate) administer a work sample or technical test. Only someone who’s performed the job at a similar scale and context can reliably assess another’s ability. In engineering? Give them a code or “vibe code” test. Marketing? Write a non-AI generated positioning piece. Sales? Pitch a panel or break down objections from a real-world scenario.

Cultural Fit: Only insiders with a lived understanding of your company’s values, pace, and quirks can judge fit. Let team members, not just execs, interview for culture, attitude, and coachability. Keep in mind Howard Schultz’s maxim:

“Hiring people is an art, not a science, and résumés can’t tell you whether someone will fit into a company’s culture.”

Keep skill interviews and culture interviews separate, and don’t skip either. Skill without fit leads to friction; fit without skill leads to frustration.

Who Should Interview? And Who Absolutely Should Not

One core message I reinforced in my book:

“If you have not personally held the role for which you are interviewing a candidate—at the stage the company is currently operating or will soon be operating—do the company a favor and be a ‘cheerleader’ only. Do not pretend to be a role-based interviewer.”

This is perhaps the most overlooked but essential truth in hiring. Engineering managers should not be assessed by non-engineers. Sales leaders should be tested by those who’ve carried quota in similar markets. Investors and board members who haven’t performed the role? Stick to selling on why they are involved with the company, not vetting a candidate's skills.

Recent media echoes this sentiment:

1. Harvard Business Review (2024): “The biggest mistake in technical hiring is delegating interviews to people who will never work directly with the candidate or who do not understand the job’s day-to-day realities.” (HBR, March 2024)
2. Molly Graham (ex-Facebook/Google): In a 2024 Wired interview, Graham stressed, “Don’t let ‘seniority’ trump real-world expertise in the interview process. Great interviews are run by people who know what ‘great’ actually looks like on the job.”

How to Run the Process (and Not Fall for Resume Traps)

Skills Assessment:

• Build role-specific questions/tests with current top performers or external advisors who have real experience at your current scale.
• Make the candidate show, not just tell (work sample, coding assignment, live pitch, product teardown, etc.)
• Don’t let anyone who hasn’t recently done the job in a company at your stage use the interview to “try out” their people management skills.

Culture & Value Alignment:

• Have the team (engineering, marketing, sales—whoever the candidate will work with daily) test for fit.
• Focus on scenario questions: “Tell me about a time you gave feedback and how you handled it,” “Describe a time you owned a mistake,” or “What did you do when you disagreed with a team decision?”
• Check for alignment with your actual operating values, not what’s written on plaques as stated company “Core Values”.

Reference Checks:

• The HR team and hiring manager should go beyond the references the candidate provides. Ask those references to recommend others who have worked with the candidate (the “backchannel” reference).
• In those conversations, focus on behaviors, not just accomplishments. Ask: “Would you hire this person again? Why or why not?”

Selling the Candidate:

• Bring in people (executives, board members, admired team members) whose job is to sell the company to the candidate, not to interrogate. Give a clear sense of vision, mission, and why others have joined and stayed.

Common Mistakes and Modern Pitfalls

• Overweighting Credentials Over Context: The latest research from the Josh Bersin Company (2024) predicts the fastest growing hiring trend is skills-based hiring, with 85% of companies saying degree requirements are less meaningful than proof of role-relevant skill. Yet most hiring errors happen when companies mistake résumé shimmer for job-readiness in their unique context.
• Ignoring New AI-Driven Assessments: AI-enhanced screening can rapidly sort candidates, but it’s not a substitute for real-world or live assessment by top operators. Use AI as a supplement, not a shortcut to human judgment.
• The “Panel Illusion”: Having many interviewers doesn’t improve accuracy if none of them are close to the job. Streamline panels to focus on skills and culture, not generic popularity contests.

The Rise of Performance Intelligence: AI-Native Assessment for Fit and Skill

Today, a new AI-native category is rapidly transforming how organizations hire, onboard, and develop talent: Performance Intelligence. Traditional performance management focused primarily on annual reviews and static metrics; Performance Intelligence, by contrast, is about enabling real-time, ongoing measurement of potential and achievement throughout an employee’s lifecycle, from the moment they interview.

Companies like Intertru are pioneering this shift by introducing real-time AI interviewing agents. These agents don’t just automate screening questions; they actively adapt lines of questioning based on a candidate’s responses, dynamically probe for both technical and behavioral evidence, and surface actionable insights about both “hard” skills and “soft” attributes—think cultural alignment, resilience, and intellectual curiosity. Because the agent can instantly analyze large sets of response data, consistency goes up and bias goes down.

With Performance Intelligence systems, leaders gain a continuous, data-driven picture of each team member’s strengths, learning trajectory, and impact. Instead of a stale “hire and hope” approach, organizations can:

• Make objective, evidence-based decisions upstream and downstream in the hiring process
• Calibrate developmental opportunities and promotions dynamically, based on real observed behaviors and outcomes
• Accelerate the velocity and accuracy of matching candidates to roles—even in remote or distributed-first environments

These new systems provide the rigor of skills-based assessment with the flexibility and objectivity required for scalable, fair, and forward-thinking talent development.

Final Thought: Fire Fast, But Don’t Shortcut the Hiring Loop

As I wrote in Traversing the Traction Gap:

“Hire slowly, fire fast—it’s hard, but if the people you started with aren’t cutting it, you must transition them out or move them into roles better suited for their skill sets.”

A+ players set the standard. Cultural misfits, even with great skills, can set you back months. And remember: the person who interviews best isn’t always the person your company needs now.

Summary Checklist:

• Only proven practitioners assess for skills.
• Team insiders own the culture screen.
• Founder, CEO, or Senior Executive closes the deal (and owns the final call).
• References: always “go backchannel.”
• Treat interviewing as an art, not a checkbox exercise.

A mis-hire in larger companies is problematic but the margin for hiring error at a startup is razor thin—raise the bar, run a disciplined process, and remember: your next 10 hires will define your trajectory more than your next 10 product features.

Culture Test

Want to find out where your Core Values truly stand—and get actionable ways to strengthen culture as a business advantage? Intertru has developed a 10-question survey to help companies quickly assess whether their Core Values are clearly defined, lived, and embedded in their hiring and people systems and processes. Test your Core Values strength and start tightening the links between your values, people, and company results.

Take the survey here – all responses are strictly confidential.

For more on interviewing and team-building, see Chapters 6 and 7 of "Traversing the Traction Gap".