Smarter by the Minute

Most JDs are historical artifacts dressed up as hiring tools. Someone leaves, you dust off their description, tweak a few bullets, and post. I've seen the same job description recycled across three companies over twenty years. Same role. Different decade.

Here's the downstream damage: your sourcing targets the wrong profile. Your screening filters out the right candidates. Your interview questions assess for the past. And you wonder why the hire doesn't stick.

Research consistently shows top performers meet 60–70% of listed requirements. If you're filtering for 100%, you're filtering out your best people before they apply.

Before you write your next JD, answer these three questions first: — What does this person need to accomplish in year one? — What do our best current performers actually have in common? — What's changed since we last hired for this role?

The description comes last. The thinking comes first.

Every candidate you’re interviewing has been coached by ChatGPT.

That changes everything about how you should be interviewing. Is your process still giving you signal — or just measuring AI prep quality?

Here’s the uncomfortable reality: behavioral interview frameworks like STAR were designed for a world where candidates answered off the cuff. That world no longer exists.

Most candidates heading into your interviews have fed your job description and likely your company’s Glassdoor reviews into ChatGPT and walked out with a rehearsed, polished, perfectly structured answer to every question you could possibly ask.

That doesn’t make them bad candidates. It makes your behavioral questions unreliable signals.

The hiring teams I’m seeing adapt the fastest have made one core shift: they’ve moved from “tell me about a time” to “here’s a real situation — what would you do?” Real-time problem scenarios, not rehearsable narratives.

It’s a small change with a significant signal improvement.

The conversation discusses the impact of toxic team members on company culture and the interviewing process. It also introduces an interview question to identify ownership and blame-shifting tendencies in candidates.

Takeaways

• Toxic team members externalize blame, while owners internalize and take ownership.
• Interview question: Tell me about a time a project didn't go as planned. Listen for I vs. they/them in the response.

According to research, the average knowledge worker saves 12 articles per week but reads fewer than 2. If you're a senior leader, that ratio is even worse. You're triaging constantly—meetings, decisions, fires to put out. Deep reading time? It's the first thing to go.

But staying current in your field isn't optional. The executive who falls behind on industry trends, competitor moves, and emerging technologies loses their edge. The guilt compounds. The "read later" list grows. You start making decisions with incomplete information.

I've been fighting this battle for twenty years. My reading list currently sits at 147 items. Articles about AI developments, talent trends, workforce predictions, tech evaluations—all critical to my work, all unread.

Until I tested a solution that actually works.