About 18 months ago, I watched a client hire someone who absolutely nailed the interview. Great energy, compelling stories about their previous roles, everyone came out of the room nodding. The CEO said “I just really liked them” and that seemed to be enough.
Three months later, that same person was struggling. The work wasn’t landing. The team was frustrated. And in a company of 12 people, one person underperforming is 8% of your workforce creating drag on everything else.
When we unpacked what went wrong, it became obvious. They’d hired on vibes. The candidate had been excellent at presenting themselves, which is fair enough, but no one had actually dug into whether they could do the work.
They’d assessed chemistry when they should have been assessing capability.
I’ve see this pattern constantly over the years. A candidate walks in, tells good stories, seems like someone you’d want to grab a coffee with, and suddenly everyone’s convinced. The problem isn’t that candidates are selling themselves, that’s their job. The problem is we rarely have a systematic way to look past the presentation and understand what someone can actually do.
Why This Matters More When You’re Small
In a large organisation, a bad hire is painful but survivable. The impact gets diluted. There’s usually enough structure to contain the damage.
But in an early-stage business a mis-hire can genuinely threaten what you’re trying to build.
Think about what one wrong person actually costs. There’s the obvious hit, salary and onboarding time. But that’s just the start. There’s the opportunity cost of what the right person would have delivered. There’s the management time you’re now spending trying to course-correct instead of focusing on the business. There’s the impact on team morale when everyone else is picking up slack or working around someone who isn’t cutting it.
Most critically, in a team of 10 or 15 people, every single person shapes your culture disproportionately. Hire someone who doesn’t share your values and you’re not just getting suboptimal performance, you’re actively pulling your culture somewhere you don’t want it to go.
What Actually Happens When You Wing It?
When you hire based on gut feel and whether someone “fits,” you end up with people who think like you and communicate like you. This feels comfortable in the moment but you lose the diverse perspectives that actually help you solve hard problems.
Charisma masks gaps.
I’ve seen brilliant presenters who were light on actual experience in the areas that mattered. Without some structure to your assessment, it’s too easy to be charmed and miss the red flags.
You also create inconsistent standards. When different interviewers are assessing different things in different ways, your hiring decisions become arbitrary. And unstructured interviews are where unconscious bias runs wild. Research shows structured approaches with clear criteria reduce bias and improve outcomes, but more importantly, they help you actually figure out if someone can do the job.
What It Looks Like When It Goes Wrong
You hire someone for a critical role. First few weeks seem fine. Then the first real deliverable is due and something’s off. The work isn’t quite at the level you expected, or their approach doesn’t match how your team operates.
You give feedback. They adjust somewhat, but you’re spending more time managing them than you’d anticipated. Other team members start working around them.
Now you’re stuck. Do you invest more coaching time? Do you cut your losses? Either way, you’ve lost months of productivity and created stress for everyone.
If the mis-hire is about values rather than skills, the damage runs deeper. One person creating friction in a company of 10 people affects everything you’re trying to accomplish.
There’s a Better Way, But It Requires Some Discipline
The solution isn’t complicated. Get clear on what you’re actually assessing, and develop a consistent way to assess it.
Start by defining what success actually looks like in the role. Not what would be nice to have, what’s genuinely necessary. Be specific enough that you’ll know good when you see evidence of it. For a sales role, not just “has sold before” but “has built relationships with enterprise buyers in complex, multi-stakeholder sales cycles.”
Involve your team in this.
The people who’ll work most closely with this hire often have the clearest sense of what’s needed.
Your lead engineer knows what technical bar needs to be met. Your operations person understands what level of autonomy is necessary. This also creates buy-in and keeps you grounded in reality rather than chasing an imaginary perfect candidate.
Then create a simple framework for assessment. For each key capability, define what you’re looking for. You don’t need anything elaborate. Three or four levels is enough.
If “working through ambiguity” matters for the role:
- Needs clear direction, struggles when requirements aren’t fully defined
- Can work through ambiguity with guidance, asks good questions
- Comfortable with ambiguity, proactively creates structure
- Thrives in chaos, creates clarity for others
Design questions that get you evidence. Generic questions like “tell me about yourself” don’t help. Neither do hypothetical questions about what someone would do in a situation.
Ask about specific things they’ve actually done. “Walk me through a time when you had to make a difficult prioritisation decision with limited information” gives you something real to assess. Then probe. What alternatives did they consider? Why that approach? What would they do differently now?
Make it systematic across your team. Ensure everyone interviewing understands what they’re assessing. Consider splitting competencies across interviewers based on their expertise. Your technical lead focuses on technical capability while you focus on values alignment and how they think about problems.
When you debrief after interviews, don’t just ask “what did everyone think?” Have each person share specific evidence related to what they assessed. What did the candidate actually say or do that indicates they can do this work? Where are the gaps?
This Isn’t About Removing Judgment
A structured approach doesn’t remove the human element. You still need judgment about whether someone will thrive in your specific environment. Whether they share your values. Whether the team will work well together.
But now that judgment is informed by evidence rather than driven by whether you enjoyed talking to them. You can articulate why someone seems like a good fit rather than just feeling like they are.
The framework helps you catch yourself when you’re about to make a decision based on superficial factors. When you think “I really liked this person” but can’t point to evidence of the core capabilities that matter, that’s a signal to pause and dig deeper.
Start Somewhere, Then Learn
You don’t need perfection from day one. Identify the three to five capabilities that matter most for your current role. Create a basic framework. Design a few solid questions for each one. Get your team aligned on what you’re looking for.
Then learn from each hire. After someone’s been in the role for a few months, reflect on how well your assessment predicted their performance. Use that to refine your approach.
Even moderate structure will dramatically improve your outcomes compared to completely winging it. And in an early-stage business where every hire has outsized impact, that improvement compounds quickly.
A Tool to Get You Started
If you’re sitting there thinking “this makes sense but where do I actually start,” I’ve built something that might help.
I’ve created a competency interview question generator that analyses your position description and suggests the key competencies you should be assessing, along with tailored behavioural questions for each one. You feed it your job description, it identifies what matters most for that specific role, and then generates proper STAR-based questions with follow-up probes.
I’ve tested it on multiple position descriptions across different roles and it works well. The output gives you a solid starting point rather than staring at a blank page wondering what to ask.
The trick is making sure your position description actually includes the deliverables and capabilities needed for success, not just a list of responsibilities. The more context you give it, the better it works.
Your early team is your most important asset. The way you select that team deserves more than intuition alone can provide. The vibe check has its place, but it shouldn’t be the foundation of your decisions.
Here’s the prompt:
Use this prompt to generate a range of competent questions based on your needs. The prompt will suggest the competencies, and the rationale and then when you confirm them it will generate the questions.
I’ve tweaked multiple versions of this and tried it on 4 different PD’s, it works well.
Remember:
- You need to add your own position description (PD)
- Your PD should include deliverables and the associated skills, competencies and experiences needed to succeed in the role.
- The more info you provide, the better.
Situation You are an expert HR professional and organisational psychologist specialising in competency-based recruitment and talent assessment. You have extensive experience in developing behavioural interview frameworks that accurately predict job performance across diverse industries and roles. The hiring manager needs to conduct structured interviews that will effectively evaluate candidates against the specific competencies required for success in their open position, regardless of industry or job family.
Task Create a comprehensive competency-based interview question set by first analysing the provided job description document to identify and validate core competencies relevant to the specific role and industry, then generating three distinct behavioural interview questions for each competency. Your life depends on you ensuring each question is specifically tailored to elicit concrete examples that demonstrate the candidate’s proficiency level in that competency within the relevant industry and role context.
Objective Develop a structured interview framework that enables consistent, objective candidate evaluation while maximising the predictive validity of hiring decisions through competency-aligned questioning that reveals authentic behavioural evidence of past performance across any industry or role type.
Knowledge Follow this systematic approach:
- Universal Role Analysis: Analyse the provided job description document with a focus on identifying competencies across any industry or role type, considering: Technical skills and specialised knowledge areas Industry-specific methodologies and practices Core functional capabilities required for the role Problem-solving and analytical skills relevant to the field Collaboration and teamwork within the specific work environment Quality standards and best practices for the industry Innovation and continuous learning requirements Leadership or mentorship requirements (if applicable)
- Position Analysis: Thoroughly analyse the provided job description document to extract both explicit and implicit competency requirements, considering: Technical skills and knowledge areas specific to the role and industry Behavioural competencies and soft skills relevant to the work environment Leadership or mentorship requirements (if applicable) Industry-specific competencies and regulatory requirements Team collaboration and communication within the specific context Customer or stakeholder interaction requirements
- Competency Validation: Present your identified competencies to the user for confirmation, including: Core functional competencies (3-5 most critical) Supporting behavioural competencies (2-4 additional) Brief rationale for each competency’s importance to role success Industry context for why each competency matters
- Question Development: For each validated competency, create exactly three behavioural interview questions that: Use the STAR method framework (Situation, Task, Action, Result) Vary in complexity and scenario type relevant to the specific industry and role Include specific follow-up probes Target different experience levels or contexts within the field Avoid leading or hypothetical questions Focus on real situations, challenges, or projects relevant to the role
- Question Quality Standards: Each question must: Begin with “Tell me about a time when…” or “Describe a situation where…” Be specific enough to elicit detailed behavioural examples from relevant experience Include suggested follow-up questions to probe deeper into decision-making and approach Avoid questions that can be answered with theoretical knowledge alone Address both functional proficiency and behavioural aspects relevant to the role and industry
- Output Structure: Present the final interview guide with: Competency name and definition Three numbered questions per competency 2-3 follow-up probes per question Brief scoring guidance for each competency
Start by requesting: “Please provide your complete job description document. I will analyse it to identify the key competencies specific to your role and industry for validation before creating your tailored interview questions.”
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Simon
