Most interviewers are listening for the right answer. After 5,000 interviews, I stopped doing that a long time ago.
The right answer is the easy part. Candidates prepare for it. They practice it on the drive over. Some of them have it scripted well enough that it sounds completely natural. What tells you something real about a person is everything around the answer: how quickly they get to it, what they choose to emphasize, what they almost say and then walk back, what they say when they think the evaluation part is over.
Reading candidates is a skill. Like most skills, you can accelerate it if you know what to look for. Here is what almost two decades of doing this actually taught me.
The real reason someone is looking is almost never the first thing they say
When you ask a candidate why they are leaving their current job, most of them say compensation. I want to make more money. I feel underpaid for what I bring to the table.
That is almost never the real reason. Pay is a consideration for everyone. But in the thousands of conversations I have had with people who were actively looking, the two reasons that actually drove the decision were almost always the same. Either there was no room to grow, no new challenge, no sense that they were becoming more capable or more valued than they were two years ago. Or they did not get along with the people they worked with, specifically their boss.
Those two things matter because they are structural. You can negotiate a salary. You cannot negotiate your way out of a job that stopped challenging you, and you cannot negotiate your way out of a culture that is not a fit. People who are leaving for those reasons have usually already made the decision before they reached out to you. Compensation is the explanation they give because it is the most socially acceptable one.
Understanding this changes how you conduct a screening call. The question is not just why are you leaving, but what do you actually need from your next role. Those are different conversations, and both are worth having before you spend three hours putting someone through a full interview process.
How someone talks about their last job tells you more than what they say
One of the clearest signals I learned to listen for early in a candidate conversation is tone when discussing a previous employer.
There is a version of this that is fine and even informative: the culture was more cutthroat than I prefer, the team was very siloed and I thrive in collaborative environments, the work became routine and I need more challenge. Those are honest, specific, and tell you something useful about what this person needs to succeed.
Then there is the version that is a red flag: going on at length about how the manager was impossible, how colleagues stole credit, how the entire organization was broken. Sometimes these things are true. Sometimes a person has genuinely had a bad run. But someone who leads with sustained negativity about a previous employer is showing you something about how they process difficulty, and that pattern tends to follow people from job to job.
The framing I always looked for was: can this person describe something that did not work without it consuming the whole conversation? That ability, to acknowledge a bad situation honestly without living in it, is a strong signal about how someone is going to handle the inevitable friction that exists in every workplace.
The career history is a pattern, not a list of facts
When I look at someone’s job history and see five companies in six years, the instinct for most people is to flag it immediately as a red flag. Sometimes it is. But the more useful question is what the pattern actually shows.
Five companies in six years with a promotion or a meaningful salary increase each time is a completely different story than five companies in six years at the same title and roughly the same level. The first person is ambitious, versatile, and figured out how to compound their value quickly. The second person has a pattern worth exploring, because something kept not working, and without understanding what that was, you have no way of knowing whether it is going to happen again.
The 80/20 rule applies here. Eighty percent of the time the pattern tells you what you think it tells you. But there is a consistent twenty percent where there is a real story underneath: a company shut down, a contract role that was never going to be permanent, a year spent caring for a family member, a deliberate decision to slow down and then re-engage. Those stories do not show up in a resume. You have to ask.
A recruiter who passes on a candidate based on a resume without digging into the career narrative is passing on the twenty percent they could not see.
Bad interviewer and bad hire are not the same thing
This distinction matters more than most hiring processes treat it.
Some people are not good at job interviews. They get nervous. They go quiet when they are thinking. They forget to mention the most relevant thing they have done until the last five minutes of the call. None of those things necessarily tell you whether this person is going to be good at the job.
The question worth asking is whether the thing making someone a difficult interviewer is the same thing that would make them a difficult colleague. Poor communication skills that persist regardless of comfort level, a pattern of not answering questions directly, a difficulty engaging with new people even as time passes: those are worth taking seriously because they will not disappear once the person is hired.
But nervousness that loosens up over time? An introvert who takes a few minutes to warm up? A technical person who thinks carefully before they speak? Those things tend to change the more someone is at ease, and they are not reasons to pass on someone who otherwise checks every box.
The most useful thing you can do when you sense this situation is give it more time. If someone starts stiff and is noticeably more themselves twenty minutes in, that is information. If someone is still uncomfortable after an hour of easy conversation, that is different information.
What the best candidates actually do
After 5,000 interviews, the themes of someone who performs well consistently are not that complicated.
The first is genuine engagement. Not performed enthusiasm, not hollow positivity, but actual interest in the conversation. People who are interested in the opportunity, curious about the team, paying attention to what the interviewer is actually saying rather than waiting for their turn to deliver a prepared answer: those people stand out immediately, because they are not that common.
The second is basic preparation, which requires almost no effort and yet separates a candidate from the majority of people they are competing against. Read the company’s about page. Look at the interviewer’s LinkedIn profile. Come in with one specific question that shows you spent ten minutes thinking about the organization before the call. That is it. Doing that in the first five minutes of a conversation puts someone in roughly the top ten percent of candidates I have ever spoken with, which should tell you something about what most people are not doing.
The third is the phone call test. If a candidate has an interview scheduled for two in the afternoon and answers the phone with “hello, who is this?” something is off. That sounds like a small thing. It is not a small thing. It is the very first moment of a process that requires attention, preparation, and some basic level of care. Twenty percent of people fail it.
Confidence and competence are not the same thing
The most reliable source of a hire that looks great and then disappoints is the candidate who is charming enough that you stop asking hard questions.
Some people are genuinely magnetic. The conversation flows. You like them immediately. You come out of the interview thinking that was one of the better conversations you have had in a while. And then they are in the role for ninety days and something is not adding up, and you realize you cannot quite remember whether they actually demonstrated the specific skills the job required or whether you just enjoyed talking to them.
Charm and competence are not the same thing, and the interview room is exactly where that distinction gets lost most often.
— Sloane Barbour
Charm is a real quality. In most roles, interpersonal skill matters enormously. The discipline required is to notice when you are enjoying a conversation and then force yourself to go back and make sure the actual requirements of the job got evaluated, not just the person’s ability to make you feel good about the time you spent with them.
When someone is both charming and genuinely accomplished, with a track record that holds up under scrutiny, that is an A player. The key word is and.
Reading people is not a gift some recruiters are born with and others are not. It is a set of patterns that you develop over time by paying close attention, asking the right follow-up questions, and then watching what actually happens when the person is in the role. The feedback loop is slow. But if you are deliberate about it, it compounds.
The best version of this work is not about catching people out. It is about understanding someone well enough to know whether what they need and what the job offers are actually going to match. When they do, everyone wins.
Written by
Sloane Barbour
Founder + CEO, engin
Sloane Barbour is the Founder and CEO of engin, an AI-powered recruiting platform built for modern staffing teams. He has spent nearly two decades in tech recruiting and has conducted more than 5,000 interviews.