ISSUE #041 | THE LEADERSHIP CONTRARIAN
A great interview doesn’t always lead to a great hire.
Have you ever hired someone who interviewed beautifully, had the right résumé, and seemed to tick every box, only to wonder a few weeks later what happened?
How can the person showing up to work seem so different from the person you interviewed?
Almost every leader we ask has a story. Heads nod. Somebody groans. You can practically watch them replay the experience. It’s visceral.
Kathryn and I have those stories too.
In our book Fulfilled, we describe a season when our business was growing quickly and we needed more people. We hired too fast, without the tools and process we have today, and the results were painful for everyone involved.
Eventually, we found ourselves dreading walking into the business we had built.
Think about that. We owned the company, loved the work, and cared about what we were creating. And we didn’t want to walk through our own front door.
That was a difficult season indeed. Even writing about it now, I can still access that feeling of dread in my stomach. If you’ve been through something similar, you probably know exactly what I mean.
And we all know that these mistakes are expensive. You’ve invested time and money to recruit, hire, and train someone, and now you’re spending more time fixing problems and starting over. Sometimes you lose good people along the way. In a 2025 survey by recruiting firm Robert Half, 57% of managers who reported a hiring mistake said it contributed to other people leaving the team. One bad hiring decision can leave you with several positions to fill.
Let’s face it, the work is challenging enough when you have a good team. When a hire goes wrong, you’re dealing with the fallout while trying to keep the business moving.
That well known pain is why Kathryn and I care so much about helping leaders make better hiring decisions.
Skills Matter. But What Else Should You Be Looking For?
Most hiring processes focus heavily on ability. What can this person do? What have they learned? Where have they worked?
Those are important questions.
When I was younger, I wanted to be a pilot. But wanting to fly a plane and knowing how to fly one are very different things. You really don’t want to see my face in the cockpit when you board your next cross-country flight.
There is no substitute for the ability to do the job. But ability doesn’t tell us everything.
Someone can know how to do the work and still struggle to set priorities, respond to feedback, work through disagreements, or make a sound decision when the situation changes.
That’s where having good judgment comes in.
A simple way to think about good judgment is the ability to see a situation accurately, determine what matters and what to do, and then follow through.
Can they recognize the real problem? Can they weigh competing priorities? Can they make a decision and act on it?
Those things are harder to uncover in an interview, so we often fill in the gaps with our gut.
And honestly, experience has probably given you good instincts. You’ve worked with enough people to recognize patterns. You know what a strong fit can look like.
But your gut can fail you too.
Someone looks right, sounds right, and still turns out to be the wrong hire.
Yep….there’s that groan again.
Can They Use Their Abilities When the Pressure Rises?
Here’s a question that’s harder to answer in a traditional interview.
Does this person have the capacity to use their abilities well on a day-to-day basis, and especially when the work gets difficult?
Because it will.
Priorities will compete. A customer will be upset. Someone will make a mistake. The answer won’t always be obvious.
You need people who can bring their skills into those moments and exercise good judgment. And how they manage themselves has a lot to do with that.
Kathryn and I often say that “we bring our whole selves to work, whether we want to or not.” Our confidence, stress, sense of direction, and ways of handling challenges come through the door with us every single day.
The old instruction to “leave your personal stuff at home” sounds tidy, but human beings don’t work that way. What happens outside work can affect the resources we have available inside it.
It’s common sense.
That doesn’t mean someone going through a hard season can’t be an excellent employee. They absolutely can. They may have developed strong ways of coping with stress, learned to recognize when they need help, and built relationships they can lean on. Even when life is difficult, they can stay focused, make thoughtful decisions, and work well with others.
The question is how they respond to the demands they’re carrying, and what support they may need. Their skills matter. So does their capacity to use those skills when life gets hard.
You can see the difference in how someone responds to a mistake. One person takes responsibility, makes the correction, and gets back to the work. Another person, equally skilled but extremely hard on themselves, may spend so much energy beating themselves up that they struggle to focus on what needs to happen next.
Both know how to do the job. But their response to difficulty affects how well they can use what they know. Understanding that helps us make better hiring decisions and also recognize where someone may need our support.
And we now have a way to assess these capacities before we offer someone a job. I’ll explain that in a moment, because first we need to own our side of this.
What Are We Bringing as Leaders?
Before we go further, we need to own our side of this.
Sometimes the person we hired struggles because we haven’t given them what they need to succeed. We weren’t clear about expectations. We rushed the training. We assumed experience somewhere else meant they would immediately understand how things work here.
I wrote about this in "The Hiring Myth of “Hit the Ground Running”. Even experienced people need time and support to learn a new organization.
A better hiring process doesn’t relieve us of the responsibility to lead. We need to understand the role, communicate what success looks like, and provide the training and feedback the person needs.
Otherwise, we may call someone a bad hire when the truth is actually that we’ve given them a poor start.
Part of giving someone a good start is understanding where they’re strong and where they may need our help. The more we understand before we hire them, the better prepared we are to lead them.
A Window into What the Interview May Miss
A few years ago, Kathryn and I were introduced to the Judgment Index™. We were so excited about what we saw that we were both trained and certified, and added it as a core tool for our own hiring as well as to help our clients.
It’s a values-based assessment designed to provide insight into judgment capacity. It isn’t a skills test, an IQ test, or a personality profile.
What we love about the Judgment Index™ is that it gives us clear data we can use to better understand how a person approaches work, the “what they do” side of the person, and also how they view and manage themselves, the “who they are” side. That helps us see strengths and potential challenges that a résumé and interview can easily miss.
The findings help us explore questions such as:
- How do they read people, situations, and priorities?
- What deserves further conversation about their response to pressure?
- Where are their strengths well suited to the role?
- Where might they need support or development?
It has decades of research behind it, with more than 30 validation studies, and it meets EEOC standards for employment assessments. We use it as part of a broader, role-specific hiring process.
It also has a very cool backstory with a connection to one of my heroes, Walt Disney. Ask me about that sometime.
The assessment takes about 15 minutes for most people. Its value comes from interpreting the results in the context of the work you need someone to do.
Different roles require different strengths. What serves someone well in one position may be less useful in another.
And judgment can improve. That’s an important distinction in the Judgment Index™. It assumes growth and development is possible.
We use the findings to understand where someone is today, what questions we should ask next, and whether we have the time and ability to support the growth they may need.
That can help us make a better hiring decision. It can also help us lead that person more effectively after they join the team.
What a Football Prospect Can Teach Us About Hiring
Earlier this year, Matt Barrows wrote an article in The Athletic titled The 49ers see something special in De’Zhaun Stribling. So does this little-known test.
Naturally, an article combining the San Francisco 49ers and the Judgment Index™ got our attention.
While Stribling was at Ole Miss, he took the assessment through fellow practitioner Ken Smithmier. Kathryn and I had dinner with Ken and his lovely wife a couple of years ago after an advanced training day. Over dinner, he shared great stories about his work with athletic teams using the Judgment Index™.
In the article, Smithmier reported an unusually strong result on Stribling’s personal side and interpreted the findings as suggesting confidence, receptiveness to demanding coaching, and an ability to respond well under pressure.
Ken also pointed out something that matters when you’re hiring: Stribling might not blow you away in an interview. His confidence doesn’t depend on impressing you with his answers. Ken described someone who knows who he is and intends to demonstrate it through what he does.
That’s worth taking note of. If we put too much weight on how well someone presents themselves, we can overlook a strong candidate who lets their work do the talking.
What caught my attention was how closely his assessment lined up with what the 49ers’ scouts and coaches saw independently.
The 49ers awarded Stribling its “gold helmet” designation, a distinction that is reserved for prospects who stand out in qualities such as leadership, football intelligence, and work ethic.
They saw more than a talented receiver. They saw someone they believed they could count on when the game was on the line. Someone who would be good under pressure.
What the 49ers saw in Stribling didn’t surprise Ken. It lined up with what he had already learned through the Judgment Index™, including strengths Stribling might never have called attention to in an interview.
That’s what makes this useful in our hiring decisions too. We can look beyond how well someone interviews and gain a clearer understanding of the judgment and capacity they’ll bring to the job.
What’s This Look Like in Your Company?
We recommend using the assessment once you’ve reviewed qualifications, conducted initial interviews, and narrowed the field to the candidates you’re seriously considering.
Then we interpret the findings against the actual demands of the position so you can use those results alongside interviews, references, and evidence of the person’s ability to do the work.
Based on what you learn, ask yourself a leadership question: If we hire this person, are we prepared to help them succeed?
That includes recognizing which areas we can coach, and what the person needs to be ready to handle when they arrive.
You can’t remove every uncertainty from hiring. But you can learn more before making a decision that affects your whole team.
The question in your hiring process is this: Are you learning enough about how someone will approach the work, or mostly confirming that they know how to do it?
That’s worth thinking about before the next job offer you make to someone.
If you’d like help bringing this into your hiring process, reply and let us know. Kathryn and I would be glad to talk through the role and what you’re trying to understand about your finalists.
And yes, Kathryn added Stribling to her fantasy football team after reading the article. Unfortunately, his first game resulted in ankle surgery, so we’ll have to wait and see how it all plays out once he is recovered.
We’re hoping his recovery goes well. Her fantasy roster would love to see him re-activated.
If you’re wondering what this should look like in your company, Kathryn and I would be glad to help you think all this through. Helping leaders grow and lead their companies well is the work we’ve been doing for more than two decades.
Reach out. It'd be an honor.
Until next time,
Keep learning.
Keep growing.
And God bless,
Michael Redman
Half a Bubble Out (HaBO)
Business Consulting | Leadership Coaching
