Who Will This Person Be on Your Team Not Just in the Interview?
By Patty Crabtree, CEO Lighthouse Consulting Partners
Many hiring managers have this experience. A candidate walks into an interview prepared, polished and ready to make a good impression. They communicate confidently, provide thoughtful examples and describe their accomplishments with ease. Everyone leaves the interview feeling good.
But there is a question that often gets overlooked: “Who will this person actually be once they become part of your team?”
The interview gives you a glimpse of a candidate under very specific conditions. They know they are being evaluated. They have likely prepared for the questions. They are focused on presenting themselves in the best possible light. Your workplace will be very different.
There will be competing priorities, difficult customers, tight deadlines, disagreements with coworkers, unexpected changes, feedback they don’t want to hear and decisions that don’t have an obvious right answer.
The real hiring question isn’t simply, “Did this person interview well?”
It is: “How is this person likely to think, communicate, make decisions, and interact with others when they are no longer trying to impress us?”
The Interview Is a Performance By Design
Interviews are, by nature, a controlled environment. Candidates are prepared, motivated to make a good impression, and typically on their best behavior. That’s not a flaw to fix; it’s simply the nature of the format. The problem arises when hiring teams treat interview behavior as a reliable preview of day-to-day team behavior, rather than as one narrow data point.
Team behavior shows up differently. It shows up in how someone reacts when a project is behind schedule and tempers are short. It shows up in whether they speak up in a meeting where their idea might get challenged or stay quiet to avoid friction. It shows up in what they do when a teammate takes credit for their work or when they are the one who disagrees with the group consensus. None of that is visible in a 45-minute conversation designed to showcase strengths.
Look Beyond the Candidate’s Story
One of the biggest challenges in interviewing is that we naturally respond to a good story. A candidate tells us about a difficult situation they successfully navigated. They explain what happened, describe the actions they took, and finish with a positive outcome. It sounds great. But the outcome isn’t necessarily the most important part of the story.
Listen for the thinking and behavior behind it.
- How did they decide what to do?
- What information did they consider?
- Did they involve others or primarily rely on their own judgment?
- How did they respond when someone disagreed?
- What did they do when their original approach didn’t work?
- What did they learn from the experience?
These details begin to reveal patterns. And patterns are much more useful than isolated stories when you’re trying to predict how someone will operate on your team.
Three Questions That Matter More Than “Tell Me About a Time…”
Traditional behavioral interview questions ask candidates to narrate a past success. They’re useful but they’re also easy to prepare for and easy to answer in a flattering way. A more revealing approach asks candidates to describe patterns rather than isolated stories.
“How do you typically handle disagreement on a team?” Not “tell me about a conflict you resolved,” but the pattern itself. Do they lean toward avoiding friction, addressing it directly or something in between? There is no universally right answer here but there is a right or wrong answer for your team’s existing dynamic.
“What role do you naturally play in group settings?” Some people default to organizing the group, some to challenging assumptions, some to supporting others’ ideas, some to quietly executing. Knowing this in advance tells you not just whether the candidate is capable but where they will actually add value on your specific team.
“When conflict arises, what do others notice about you?” This question is deceptively powerful because it asks the candidate to imagine themselves from the outside. Self-aware candidates will often give you an honest, sometimes unflattering answer and that honesty is itself a signal worth weighing.
Why This Changes the Hiring Conversation
Bringing interpersonal style into the hiring process doesn’t mean deprioritizing skills or experience. It means adding a second lens alongside them. A technically excellent candidate who consistently avoids conflict may be a poor fit for a team that relies on direct, fast feedback. A highly competitive candidate might thrive on a sales team built around individual performance but struggle on a cross-functional team that depends on shared credit and consensus-building.
The goal isn’t to find a single “ideal” interpersonal style. There isn’t one. The goal is fit: understanding how a candidate’s natural style will interact with the team they’re joining, the manager they will report to and the kind of work they will be doing. A cooperative style is an asset on a highly interdependent team and a potential bottleneck on one that needs fast, independent decisions. A direct, conflict-engaging style can be exactly what a stagnant team needs or exactly what an already-tense team doesn’t.
The Real Question Behind the Question
When you are evaluating a candidate, the question worth sitting with isn’t just “Can they do this job?” It’s “Who will this person be three months from now, in a meeting where things aren’t going well, surrounded by people they don’t yet know well enough to trust?” That is the version of the candidate who is actually going to show up on your team every day not the version who showed up for the interview.
Getting a clearer read on that version doesn’t require guesswork. It requires asking different questions and asking them with the specific intent of understanding a candidate’s default patterns rather than their prepared stories. The candidates who can answer honestly and specifically are often telling you exactly who they will be once they are on your team. The trick is knowing to ask.
The Person You Hire Becomes Part of the Team
Hiring isn’t simply about filling a position. It changes the team. The person you hire will influence how decisions are made, how problems are approached, how conflict is handled, how information is shared and how other people experience their work.
Instead of asking yourself: “Is this a good candidate?” A better question may be: “Is this the right candidate for this team and this role?”
That is why looking beyond the interview story matters. The question isn’t whether the candidate can tell a compelling story. It isn’t even whether they have the right experience.
The specific actions someone takes says a lot more than the story they weave. That is the person you are really hiring. The interview is the opportunity to discover their work style and how that will it will fit into your organization and team.
Lighthouse Consulting Partners, LLC
Testing Division provides a variety of services, including an In-depth Work Style Personality assessment for new hires, staff development, career guidance and team building. Our assessment is available in 19 different languages. In addition, we offer skills testing and 360 assessments.
Business Consulting for Higher Productivity Division provides leadership and management coaching, a variety of workshops including team building, communication styles, stress management, leadership training, staff planning, operations, and much more.
For more information on our services, please go to www.LighthouseConsulting.com or contact us at Info@LighthouseConsulting.com.