How to Interview

A candidate is perfect twice in a lifetime: once at birth, once on the resume. Everything in between is messier, and every artifact you receive before the offer has been built to hide the mess.

The resume went through six drafts. The interview answers were practiced in the car. The references were chosen because they would say the right things. None of that makes a candidate dishonest. It makes them human. It also means you are pricing a six-figure decision on polished evidence, and polish conceals exactly what you need to see.

So read every artifact the way an underwriter reads a loan file: as a set of claims to price and probe, not facts to accept. Each instrument tells you something real, and each one lies in its own particular way. Knowing which lie belongs to which instrument is most of the skill, and the order you read them in decides what you learn.

What the resume can tell you

Some signals on the page are reasonably reliable, as long as you treat them as starting coordinates rather than conclusions.

Trajectory. Has the candidate stayed in one sector or moved across several? Is responsibility compounding over time, project engineer to project manager to construction director, or holding the same altitude for years? Lateral moves and quiet demotions are not disqualifying. They are questions. Growth in scope is visible on the page; its cause is not.

Relevant experience at similar scale. A construction leader's resume should show oversight of projects at a comparable size, with fluency in codes, budgets, and safety. The specifics are the tell: scheduling software, a PMP, LEAN exposure. Most readers hunt for those keywords first, and the instinct is sound.

The employment timeline, with caveats. You can see frequent moves, long stretches, and gaps. You cannot see why any of them happened. The dates are facts. The story behind the dates is not on the page. A pattern of eighteen-month stints can signal someone who leaves the moment real accountability arrives, and it can just as easily reflect consulting work or a wave of layoffs. The number is a prompt.

Achievements over duties. A list of responsibilities tells you what someone was assigned. A list of results tells you what they did with it. Look for quantified outcomes: projects finished under budget, schedules pulled forward, costs cut, scope grown. Most resumes catalog the busy work. What you need is the business result the busy work produced.

Communication and care. The writing is your first sample of how someone thinks. In a leadership role, clarity is non-negotiable. Spelling errors, a chaotic layout, dense unbroken paragraphs: these signal rushed effort or genuine difficulty organizing thought. A clean, scannable page signals the opposite. A good standard is that the important highlights should surface on their own in about seven seconds.

Effort aimed at you. A tailored resume stands out because effort is visible. If a candidate speaks your industry's language and connects their experience to the specific job in front of them, you can read their interest level off the page. In construction that usually shows up as hard numbers: budgets managed, square footage built, safety incidents reduced, subcontractors coordinated. Concrete evidence of scale beats adjectives every time.

Read that list again and notice the pattern. Every reliable signal is about what happened, never why.

What the resume can never tell you

This is where most bad hires are born: a leader treats an inference as a fact. Four blanks on the page get filled in by assumption, and the assumption goes unexamined.

Why they left. A short tenure does not mean job hopper. It might mean layoffs, a bad manager, a culture that never fit, a relocation, or a better offer. A long tenure does not mean loyal. It might mean risk aversion, comfort, fear of change, or no better door opening. Both readings are guesses until you ask: what moved you to leave that company, or if I call your last boss, what will they say about why you left?

How well they performed. A listed accomplishment does not prove the candidate drove it. A title does not prove they earned it or executed at that level. Make them show the work: tell me about a project where you directly moved the outcome, and if I call your peers, what will they say about your contribution?

Work ethic, attitude, ownership. No resume reveals whether someone is humble, durable under pressure, or honest about their own mistakes. It will not show you whether they take ownership or hunt for someone to blame. Behavioral questions do that work: tell me about a mistake you made and how you handled it, describe a conflict with a coworker and what you did about it.

Whether they will work well here. Personality, communication style, and values do not survive translation onto a page. Someone can look ideal on paper and grind against your team the first week. What you are listening for later is consistency, humility, and self-awareness: what kind of environment lets you do your best work, and what feedback changed how you operate?

Every reliable signal on a resume tells you what happened. None of them tell you why. The why is the entire job.

The resume lies in both directions

Most leaders guard one direction and leave the other wide open.

Read too optimistically and the polish costs you. A clean resume can mask thin skills or a weak work ethic. An impressive title can sit on top of mediocre execution. A long run at a respected company does not certify a strong performer. I have watched younger project managers submit sleek, buzzword-dense resumes with expensive formatting and well-marketed wins, then write checks in the field their skills could not cash.

Read too skeptically and you delete the best person in the pile before you ever speak to them. Some of the most respected senior superintendents I have worked with had resumes that were humble to the point of being easy to underestimate: a few quiet lines under each role, no bold claims, no metrics, decades of steady consistency. Walk one of their jobsites or talk to one of their crews and the influence is unmistakable. The page never came close to capturing it.

Underestimating the quiet operator and overrating the polished one are the same error wearing different clothes: trusting the marketing rather than underwriting the person.

The part I take real satisfaction in is handing a client a candidate who looks unremarkable on paper and watching them reconsider. It only happens when someone has done the work to see past the document, and that work is not infallible. Pretending otherwise is its own dishonesty.

Where the page should make you suspicious

Read with the eye of someone underwriting risk rather than someone being sold.

• Inconsistencies and gaps. A title that does not match the one on LinkedIn, dates that do not line up. Small mismatches are an invitation to dig, not a verdict.
• Achievements too good to be true. When every accomplishment is monumental, or a junior title claims credit for executive-level outcomes, slow down. Inflating scope of responsibility is the most common resume distortion there is.
• Buzzword language. "Results-oriented self-starter" with no example behind it usually means the example does not exist. Cliché is where substance goes to hide.
• Generic, untailored content. An objective that does not quite fit, goals unrelated to your role. Signs the candidate is applying everywhere and treating your job as one of many.
• Carelessness. If someone's best foot forward is full of errors, that is information about every foot that follows.
• Outright lying. The numbers are sobering. One 2024 survey found that 64.2% of employees admitted to misrepresenting skills, experience, or references on a resume at least once, and a majority of hiring managers report having caught a lie on one.
• Predictive-validity traps. Some of the factors leaders weight most heavily, years of education and raw years of experience, are among the weakest predictors of actual performance. And bias rides along quietly. Decades of callback audit studies have found that identical resumes draw fewer responses when the name on them reads as non-Anglo.

The resume earns a place at the table, never the head of it. Hunt for patterns across the whole document rather than isolated facts you can react to. Let it shape your questions about experience, motivation, and self-awareness. Treat it as the candidate's sales pitch, because that is exactly what it is. Then build the interview to test the claims that matter most, and carry the discrepancies into the reference call, where they get interesting.

One more discipline, and it is about you rather than the candidate: write down your evaluation before you hear your colleagues', so you are not anchored to the loudest voice. And distrust your own confidence in reading anyone from paper. That confidence is precisely what the page was built to exploit.

A screening is not an interview

A recruiter's screening and a company's interview are sequential and complementary. Treat one as a substitute for the other and you will hire someone who looked right on paper and failed in the field.

A screening answers one question: should this conversation even happen? It qualifies on baseline skills and experience, whether the role matches the candidate's career and compensation needs, interest and timing, leadership and environment preferences, and logistics like location, relocation, work authorization, and notice period. That is all it does. It prevents hiring managers from spending time on candidates who would never work out. It is not a deep read on leadership alignment, team dynamics, training gaps, or long-term trajectory.

The company interview is where the hiring decision happens. It moves from "can this person do the job" to "will this person thrive here," and it produces four things a screening cannot: respect and trust between the candidate and your leadership, conceptual agreement on what success in the role looks like, genuine understanding of and appetite for the actual challenges, and an honest accounting of the development gaps and how you will support them.

Companies go wrong in two specific ways when they blur the steps. First, they read a recruiter's qualification as an endorsement, when a recruiter qualifies broadly across many companies and is not assessing fit for one role inside one team. Second, they skip the work of building alignment, which nobody outside the company can do for them. A recruiter cannot manufacture excitement, trust, or commitment. Only the hiring team can, through direct engagement.

So respect the recruiter's role as qualification, run a structured interview that builds alignment on purpose, and close the loop back to the recruiter with real feedback so the sourcing sharpens. If you want the mechanics of the structure itself, that is how to design an interview process.

What a job fit assessment shows that an interview cannot

A resume tells you what someone has done. An interview tells you how they perform under the specific pressure of being interviewed. Neither tells you what it will feel like to work together once the offer is signed, and that gap is where most failed hires live.

A job fit assessment closes it. It measures how a candidate's thinking style, behavioral traits, and interests line up with the real demands of a specific role and the leader they will report to. The instrument we use is the ProfileXT, the PXT.

Experience does not guarantee performance in your environment. A superintendent who thrived under a hands-off owner can stall under one who wants daily detail, and the resume will never say so. The assessment shows how a candidate naturally processes information, absorbs stress, and works alongside other people. Most hires that fail do not fail on skill. They fail on mismatched pace, communication style, or motivation, and those are exactly the blind spots that surface here while the decision is still reversible.

What comes back is not a scorecard that sorts people into pass and fail. It reads closer to a playbook: how to lead this person, how to support them, and what it will take to keep them.

The same instrument cuts both ways, which is the point. A candidate gets to see the leadership style of the person they would work under, which hiring almost never offers before day one. They see their own strengths and stress points in plain terms, which sharpens how they describe the conditions under which they do their best work. And instead of hoping the interview happened to ask the right questions, both sides can have a direct, evidence-backed conversation about where they fit and where they will have to work at it.

The PXT is not a tool for screening people out. It is a way to start an honest conversation before day one, so both parties decide with their eyes open.

The information you need in order to predict the relationship is available before the offer goes out. Whether you look at it is the part you control.

Layer the instruments; never let one render a verdict

Most hiring authorities treat a personality assessment like a metal detector at the airport. The candidate either clears the gate or gets pulled aside. Pass or fail.

That instinct is backward, and it tells me more about the leader running the search than about the person being assessed. A leader who wants a verdict from a test would rather outsource judgment than build it.

There are many instruments in circulation, each a different lens on behavior and work style.

• Wiley PXT (ProfileXT): cognitive ability, behavioral traits, occupational interests
• VOPS by Scale Architects: how people naturally create value inside an organization
• Kolbe Index: instinctual problem-solving and natural work habits
• DISC: behavior and communication styles
• Myers-Briggs (MBTI): psychological preferences and personality types
• Big Five: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism
• CliftonStrengths: a person's top talents
• Enneagram: the core motivations and fears that drive behavior
• Hogan: traits tied to leadership and workplace performance
• Thomas-Kilmann (TKI): how people handle conflict
• EQ-i: emotional intelligence and interpersonal skill

Each is a two-dimensional slice of a far more complex person. No single assessment captures someone, any more than one X-ray captures a three-dimensional body. Read one report as the only truth and you are diagnosing a patient from a single film.

Stack a few and the picture turns dynamic. PXT surfaces cognitive ability and work style. VOPS shows how someone creates value. Kolbe reveals how they act on instinct. Used together they stop answering the thin question, "are they a good fit," and start opening the real ones: how does this person think, how do they work, how will they sit next to the people already here.

And keep the time dimension in view. You are not the same person you were five years ago, probably not the same person you were last year. Any test taken today is a snapshot.

Assessments are guides, not verdicts. The moment you let one render a verdict, you have stopped doing the work of knowing the person.

Lean on gut instinct alone and you leave too much to chance. Lean on the assessment as a pass-or-fail gate and you throw away the most useful thing it gives you. Both shortcuts have the same root: a leader looking for something outside themselves to make the call. The instrument sharpens your judgment. It cannot replace it. The sharper your own read on people, the more every one of these tools is worth.

Take the assessment yourself

Here is the change that makes the difference. Both the candidate and the hiring manager complete the same assessment and review the results together.

Judging fit from the candidate's results alone is like inspecting one side of a bridge for structural integrity. You have looked at real data and still missed half the load path.

Reading both sides changes what the process produces. The candidate commits with their eyes open, because they understand how their future boss operates, and that makes the yes more durable. It signals respect, because when only the candidate is evaluated the power sits on one side of the table. It raises self-awareness on both sides. And it opens conversations a normal interview never reaches: work styles, decision-making, stress responses, communication habits.

Four moves turn results into that conversation.

Work styles and cognitive processing. "You scored highly in numerical reasoning, so you likely enjoy working with data and logic. Your future manager scored lower here and may prefer broad concepts over detailed analysis. How do you see that playing out between you?" That forces a real exchange about how decisions get made, how much detail belongs in a report, and where friction will show up.

Communication and collaboration. "Your results suggest you are highly independent in decision-making, while your potential boss thrives on collaboration. Have you worked with a leader like that before, and how would you adjust?" A one-sided assessment stamps the candidate "too independent." A bilateral conversation reveals how both people can adapt.

Strengths and likely conflicts. From Kolbe: "Your instinctive problem-solving style is Quick Start, so you like to experiment and iterate. Your future manager runs more Fact Finder and wants detailed analysis before acting. How would you handle a moment when they need more time to decide?" That puts the actual mechanics of how work gets done on the table and sets honest expectations.

Leadership and growth preferences. From VOPS: "Your results suggest you create value by bringing structure and process. Your hiring manager thrives in flexibility. Where could the two of you complement each other, and where will you each need to adjust?" The framing stays on strengths and moves the question from "is this a good fit" to "how do we make this work."

Notice what happens to the questions a leader asks. "Do I like this candidate" becomes "how do we work best together." "Are they a good fit" becomes "what adjustments will help us both succeed." "Will they succeed here" becomes "how can I set them up to succeed."

If you already run assessments and stop at the score, the most useful insight in the file is going untouched.

Thirty unfinished sentences

The instrument is simple and it costs almost nothing. Give the candidate thirty sentence stems and ask them to finish each one quickly, in writing, without overthinking.

• I am proudest of:
• When I fail:
• When I disagree with someone at work:
• When criticized I:
• Company politics is:
• When I don't get results:
• Controlling my emotions is:
• My real ambition is:

The instructions matter as much as the stems. Short answers. Move fast. Do not overthink. Speed is the whole point: a candidate with twenty seconds per stem gives you their first-order response, the one that runs their behavior on a Tuesday afternoon under deadline pressure. A candidate with a week and a thesaurus gives you their brand.

This makes no claim to validated psychometrics. Think of it as a core sample. A geotech crew does not pull a core to pass judgment on the dirt. They pull it to learn what the ground will carry before anyone pours a footing.

Interviews are good at surfacing competence and bad at surfacing disposition. A superintendent can walk you through a schedule recovery in convincing detail and still be someone who goes quiet for three days after criticism. The stems aim at disposition, and they cluster around what sinks hires after the honeymoon.

Ownership. "When I don't get results:" is the sharpest stem on the list. Watch where the sentence goes. "I figure out what I missed" and "the goalposts usually moved" describe two different employees, and both people will interview well.

Failure and criticism. "When I fail:" and "When criticized I:" reveal whether a person metabolizes hard feedback or merely survives it. "I take a day, then I want the details" is a gift. So is "I usually think the criticism says more about the critic," in the other direction.

Conflict. "When I disagree with the majority:" and "When there is conflict I:" tell you whether you are hiring someone who will voice the dissent your team needs or swallow it until it curdles.

Motive. "My real ambition is:" and "Success means:" show you what the person is aiming their career at. If the answer contains nothing your company can offer, no amount of interview charm changes that math.

No single answer means much. A pattern across thirty means a great deal, and there are four patterns worth counting.

Direction of agency. Across all thirty, how often is the candidate the actor in their own sentences versus the recipient of circumstances? One deflection is a sentence. Fifteen is a worldview.

Concreteness. "Integrity is: doing what you said on the change order nobody will ever audit" comes from lived experience. "Integrity is: very important" comes from nowhere. Abstract answers across the board suggest someone who has not examined their own working life, which matters if you are hiring them to examine anyone else's.

Heat. Somewhere in the thirty, most people get honest. "I get annoyed when:" and "Company politics is:" carry heat, and heat is information. A flash of real irritation about vague direction, credit-taking, or being micromanaged tells you precisely what this person needs from you in order to succeed.

Internal contradiction. "Colleagues think I am: direct" sitting next to "When there is conflict I: avoid it until it's necessary" is not a lie. It is the outline of a person who has not reconciled their self-image with their behavior, and it is the single best interview question the exercise will hand you.

Everything you find goes one place: into the interview, as a question. "You wrote that when you don't know what to do, you keep it to yourself and work it out. Tell me about the last time that served you, and the last time it cost you." Candidates open up when you ask about what they wrote, because you are quoting them to themselves. It is the rare interview question that cannot be answered with a canned story.

Three rules keep the exercise honest, because it reads people at close range.

Tell the candidate what it is and what it is not: this helps us understand how you think, there are no right answers, nobody passes or fails. Then honor that framing. The day a candidate learns they were screened out over one sentence is the day your hiring process becomes a story other candidates hear.

Place it mid-process rather than at the gate. Asking for that level of candor before you have earned any trust produces guarded answers or resentment. After a first conversation it reads as interest. Before one it reads as surveillance.

And complete it yourself before you send it to anyone. Sit with "When criticized I:" and "When I don't get results:" and write your own honest endings. If the answers make you flinch, you have found the reason the exercise works. You cannot read agency, candor, and self-awareness in someone else's sentences if you have never checked for them in your own.

The reference call most people run is theater

The three names your finalist handed you will all say hire this person. The candidate chose them for exactly that reason. Calling all three and collecting the yes gives you the feeling of diligence without the information.

By the time most hiring managers dial, the decision is made. The interviews went well, the team liked him, the offer letter is half drafted. The call exists to confirm a choice and everyone on the line knows it. Dates, titles, a few warm adjectives, done in eleven minutes.

Three forces guarantee that outcome. The candidate curated the list, and nobody volunteers the boss they clashed with. The reference wants to help someone they like. And you want the hire to work, because the role has been open since spring and the backlog is growing. Every incentive on the call points toward yes, so honest signal has to be pulled against that grain.

References still carry signal. The standard questions are what waste it. "What are their strengths and weaknesses" invites a rehearsed answer from a friendly witness.

Two setup moves change what the same witness will tell you.

Move the frame from verdict to fit. Open with something like: "I am trying to set him up to succeed if he takes the job, and that starts with understanding how he works." A reference who thinks you are hunting for a reason to reject will defend the candidate. A reference who believes you are planning for the candidate's success will describe him. Description is what you came for.

Then calibrate the witness before you weigh the testimony. Ask how they worked together and for how long, and what the company and the projects looked like during that stretch. A reference who watched your finalist daily through a brutal hospital job outranks one who shared an office for six months of steady work. Weight everything that follows accordingly.

Reference questions that get honest signal

• "Would you hire him again tomorrow? For what role?" The first half gets a reflexive yes. The second half is the real question. An old boss who would bring a superintendent back "to run one of our smaller jobs" just told you the ceiling as he sees it.
• "Where did he need the most support from you?" Softer than asking for weaknesses and far more concrete. Every strong performer needed support somewhere. A reference who claims otherwise is protecting rather than describing.
• "Tell me about a project that went sideways while he was on it." Every construction career includes one. You are not evaluating the failure. You are listening for what he did on day two of the problem, and whether this account matches the one you heard in the interview.
• "How did he handle the money conversations?" Change orders, buyouts, a sub going under mid-job. Money under pressure is where character stops being theoretical, and references get specific fast when you name the situations.
• "How would his crews and subs describe him?" The view from above is the most polished. The view from the field is where leadership either exists or does not.
• "Who else saw his work every day?" The candidate gave you the curated exhibit. This question reaches past it. Get the candidate's permission before making that call, and never touch a current employer.
• "What advice would you give his next manager?" Framed as help rather than judgment. Even protective references answer this one honestly, because answering it well serves the person they are protecting.

Then add the probes the role earns.

Project manager. Ask about a specific buyout or a contested change order. Then ask whether his forecasts moved gradually month to month or all at once near the end. A PM whose bad news arrives early is worth more than one whose numbers hold until they collapse.

Superintendent. Ask how the schedule survived pressure, and whether trades asked to be on his next job. Subs vote with their feet, and his old manager watched them do it.

Estimator. Ask about a bid he missed, high or low, and what changed in his process afterward. An estimator with no miss story has either never been trusted with real work or is not telling you the truth.

The pause before the repeat-hire answer carries more information than the answer. So does faint praise scaled to the role: "showed up every day, solid guy" is a fine reference for a laborer and a warning for an operations director. Watch for answers to questions you did not ask, and for scope that quietly narrows, as in "on that project, he was fine."

One caution. A reference who will confirm only dates and titles is usually following company policy rather than sending a coded message. That is when the question about who else saw his work every day earns its keep. Move to the people who are free to talk.

Stop sign or landing plan

Most of what an honest reference call produces should shape the hire, not stop it.

A confirmed development need that matches what you already saw in the interviews is onboarding input, and it belongs in the ratings that set the ramp plan. Build the first ninety days around it and tell your new hire what you are doing and why. That is what a real match looks like, both sides working from true information.

The stop sign is different in kind. When a reference's factual account contradicts the candidate's account of the same project, the job he claims to have run, or the number he claims to have carried, you no longer have a development finding. You have an integrity finding, and no amount of skill outweighs it.

Two references independently hesitating on the same trait is a pattern. One reference contradicting the resume is a finding you resolve before any offer goes out.

Never run a backdoor reference

You do it because you want the real story. You know candidates only list references who will say good things, so you call someone who knows them off the record. A peer at their current company, or a contact you trust in the industry. It feels like smart diligence.

It is a breach of trust, and it rarely produces better insight.

It breaks confidentiality. Most professionals interview quietly for a reason. Calling around about a candidate who has not told their employer they are looking puts their livelihood at risk. You may think you are being discreet, calling a friend of a friend, but word travels fast. One conversation can unravel months of careful discretion and permanently damage someone's standing where they work now. In an industry this small, where reputation is the whole asset, that is not a trivial mistake.

The feedback is unreliable. Say you do get someone on the phone. How well did they know the person? Distant colleagues, close peers, a short-term collaborator on a bad project? You do not know, and you will not get the context in a five-minute call. Even with good intent, backdoor references produce gossip rather than guidance.

The values may not transfer. You might think a VP of Construction will know what they are talking about. If that person leads with values or expectations that clash with yours, why would their opinion carry weight in your decision? Calling someone you would not hire in order to validate your hiring decision makes no sense.

If you want to learn more about someone, ask them. Ask better interview questions. Have better conversations with the references they gave you. Build enough trust that candidates want to be transparent with you. And if you cannot trust a candidate or the people they chose to vouch for them, you should not be hiring them.

Backdoor references feel clever. They are a symptom of weak process rather than strong discernment.

The order you read them in

Each instrument answers a different question and fails in a different way.

The resume tells you what happened and never why, so it sets the questions. The screening tells you whether the conversation should happen at all, and nothing about whether the person should be hired. The assessment tells you how two people will work together, which is invisible to both of the first two, and it becomes worthless the moment you ask it for a verdict. The sentence completion exercise shows you disposition before the polish goes on. The references verify the story the interview produced, and only if you build a call capable of producing an honest answer.

Read them in that order and each one sharpens the next. Read them out of order, or accept any one of them as the answer, and you are back to underwriting on polish.

The candidate wrote the resume. You decide what it is worth.