Every hiring manager has done it. Someone arrives with a brilliant CV, answers every question smoothly, ticks every box on paper. Six months later they’re struggling. And somewhere in the “no” pile is the candidate with the odd career break or the sideways move, who would probably have been brilliant, if anyone had asked the right question.
I’ve sat in on a lot of interviews over the years, on both sides of the table. None of what separates a strong hire from a plausible one is a secret. Most hiring managers know it already. It’s just the first thing that slips when you’re three interviews deep in a week and trying to get a decision made. A few things I keep coming back to.
The CV is the start of the conversation, not the verdict
A CV is a little bit meaningless until you’ve actually spoken to someone. It tells you where to look, not what to conclude. Frequent job changes, a career break, an unusual decision, none of that is an automatic red flag. It’s just a list of things to ask about. The mistake is treating the CV as the evidence, rather than the map to where the evidence might be.
This matters more in real estate than most industries. The strongest candidate for a role often doesn’t have the tidiest CV. They’ve got the odd sideways move, or a gap where they built something on their own, or a title that undersells what they actually did. If your process filters on the CV alone, you’re filtering out exactly the people worth talking to.
Ask for evidence, not adjectives
Candidates describe themselves as commercial, strategic, results-driven. Those words mean nothing on their own. If someone tells you they helped grow a business, ask how. What happened to the margin? What decisions did they actually influence, and which results can they genuinely claim as theirs, versus the team’s?
I’ve got a blunt test I use for commercial roles: would I trust them with a million pounds of my own money? Not literally about the sum, more a forcing question. Has this person actually shown judgement and accountability, or have they just answered well? If the honest answer is no, there’s more digging to do before you make an offer.
Don’t let a short interview do the deciding
A polished performance holds up for fifteen or twenty minutes. It’s much harder to sustain over an hour, especially once you’ve moved past the prepared answers and started asking things they haven’t rehearsed. People run out of scripted responses fairly quickly under sustained questioning, and what’s left is a much better read on how someone actually thinks.
If your interview slot is thirty minutes because that’s what fits the diary, you’re probably not getting far enough past the rehearsed material to know much.
The weakness question is a decent filter, if you listen properly
“I’m a perfectionist” as an answer to “what’s your weakness” tells you nothing except that the candidate has done this before. Look for people who can describe an actual mistake, what they learned from it, and show some self-awareness about it. That’s a harder thing to fake, and it’s usually a much better indicator of how someone will handle things going wrong in the job, which, in most operational real estate roles, they will.
Authenticity is easier to spot than people think
I always notice it when someone stops trying to give me the “right” answer and just tells me the honest one. It might be a candidate admitting a career move didn’t work out, or being upfront about wanting something different rather than dressing it up as a grand strategic plan. That kind of honesty, more than the polish around it, is usually what tells you someone is worth backing.
The candidates who stop performing and just answer honestly are almost always easier to read accurately than the ones giving you the answer they think you want.
The read you won’t get yourself
There’s a reason for that. Candidates are rarely completely straight with the person who’d be their boss. It’s a job interview, they don’t want to burn a bridge, and admitting the last role wasn’t right, or that they’re really leaving because of a difficult manager, feels riskier than it should. They’ll often say that to whoever’s representing them, though, because there’s nothing to lose.
That’s worth using properly. A good screen before the CV ever reaches you should already have tested the commercial claims, understood the real reason someone’s looking, and worked out whether they’ll actually hold up under a longer conversation, not just survive it. If your recruiter hasn’t done that groundwork, you’re doing their job for them in the interview room, which is neither what you’re paying for nor the best use of your time.
The practical version
Treat the CV as a set of questions, not a verdict. Push past the first answer until you’ve got a number, a decision, or an outcome attached to it. Give the conversation room to run past the rehearsed section, and make sure whoever’s screened the candidate before you has actually done that work.
