What Actually Decides a Final-Stage Interview

By the time you reach a final interview, your shortlist has already done its job. Both candidates can do the role. That is what a good process is for.

Which is exactly when the decision gets harder, not easier.

Everyone in the room is invested, and that is the problem

Your panel has met both candidates twice. Each person has formed a view. They are already imagining what the next two years look like with each of them. That is not a flaw in the panel — it is what being invested looks like.

What it costs is the ability to ask the uncomfortable question. The hard questions were asked at stage one, and by the final they have softened into something closer to a conversation. Nobody in the room is independent of the outcome, because everybody in the room has to work with whoever walks in.

So the decision quietly moves onto who the room warmed to. Chemistry matters, and it is not nothing. But it is a dangerous tie-breaker when nobody has written down what success would look like.

Research narrows the market. It cannot narrow the last two

Two of our own searches, from different sectors and different ends of the size range.

A Commercial Director for a €1.5bn window and door profile manufacturer: 111 potential candidates identified and 72 approached, 26 CVs received, 14 interviewed by Collingwood and eight recommended. The client interviewed all eight, three went to second interview, and one was appointed.

A Group Finance Director for a healthcare group: 51 candidates identified and 35 approached, eight interested, five interviewed by Collingwood and two recommended. The client interviewed one, who went through to finals and was appointed after a half-day meeting.

One search shortlisted eight, the other two. Both ended the same way — with a small number of credible people and a conversation in a room.

Research does the first hundred, or the first fifty. Nothing narrows the last few except the quality of that conversation. And that last mile is the part most businesses have the least practice at: a retained search at this level is something you might run once every two or three years.

Two things worth agreeing before the interview, not after

• The three priorities the new leader must deliver in year one.
• How you will measure their performance against each of them.

Agree them internally before the interview, not in the debrief. With those written down, a final interview has a purpose. Without them it becomes an audition — and auditions are very good at selecting the most interviewable candidate rather than the most effective one.

If you want the stages that lead up to this one, we have written them out in what to expect from a retained executive search.

What we listen for at final stage

A few of the things that tend to separate two apparently identical candidates:

• Whether they can describe a decision that went badly, and what they actually changed afterwards. Not the tidy version.
• Whether their examples scale to your business, or only to the one they came from.
• What they would need from the board in the first ninety days, and whether they have thought about it at all.
• Whether the thing they are proudest of is the thing you most need.
• What would make them say no. The answer tells you what they will ask for at offer stage, before it becomes a negotiation.

None of those are trick questions. They are simply harder to ask about someone you have already decided you like.

A final thought

The shortlist is the part of a search that looks like work. The final interview is the part that decides whether the work mattered, and it usually gets a fraction of the preparation.

The sector matters less here than it does in the search itself. Everyone in the room is invested, and somebody needs to not be — and that is as true on an aerospace and defence board as it is in private healthcare, technology, or building products and construction.

Collingwood is a retained executive search firm. If you have a senior appointment reaching final stage and would like a candid, no-obligation conversation about it, contact us.