Culture Fit, Humility, And The Limits Of AI In Recruiting with Mark Murphy

According to today's guest, most hires don’t fail because they can’t do the work, they fail because their mindset clashes with how the work gets done. In this HRchat episode, Bill Bnaham sits down with New York Times best‑selling author Mark Murphy, founder of Leadership IQ, to unpack why attitude, not technical skill, is the main reason good resumes turn into bad hires, and how to fix the interview process without adding complexity or bloat.

Mark breaks down the traps that sink interviews: stock questions that beg for canned responses, interviewers who talk too much, and prompts that accidentally coach candidates toward a “success story.” He offers a simple, repeatable structure: define the few core attitudes your team truly needs, ask targeted behavioral questions tied to those attitudes, then leave the question hanging so candidates reveal how they think under light pressure. We explore what humility looks like in real answers and why growth after mistakes is a universal green flag.

Mark also tackles a timely question: where does AI help, and where does it fall short? Automation already shines at scheduling and screening, but trained interviewers still catch evasive language, tense shifts, and non‑answers that slip past machine analysis. We compare in‑person and video formats, explain why asynchronous recordings reward scripts over substance, and show how to separate the assessment from the culture pitch so candidates still get a rich view of your team, values, and expectations.

Chapters

• 0:00 Setting The Stage: Hiring Failures
• 1:05 Mark Murphy’s Mission And Methods
• 2:42 Skills Are Table Stakes
• 4:56 Why Stock Questions Waste Time
• 7:40 Testing Humility And Growth
• 10:54 Stop Leading Candidates To Answers
• 13:36 Talk Less, Learn More
• 16:05 Split Interview And Pitch
• 18:45 In‑Person Vs Video Interviews
• 21:24 AI’s Role And Its Limits
• 25:03 Real‑Time Conversations Beat Scripts
• 27:13 Resources And How To Connect
• 28:10 Closing And Listener Reminder

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:02

Welcome to the HR Chat Show, one of the world's most downloaded and shared podcasts designed for HR pros, talent execs, tech enthusiasts, and business leaders. For hundreds more episodes and what's new in the world of work, subscribe to the show, follow us on social media, and visit hrgazette.com.

SPEAKER_03: 0:26

Welcome to another episode of the HR Chat Show. Hello, listeners. This is your host today, Bill Bannham. And today's guest has found that 89% of hiring failures are due to attitude rather than tech skills. So, why do so many companies still focus primarily on experience and qualifications? To answer this, much, much more is Mark Murphy, a New York Times best-selling author, senior contributor to Forbes, and founder of Leadership IQ, a research and training firm. His books include Hiring for Attitude, 100%ers, Hard Goals, and Managing Gnosticist, Blamers, Dramatics, and more. Mark, welcome to the show today. How are you doing? I'm doing great, Bill. Thanks so much for having me. So, as we always do on this show, Mark, maybe good to get to know you a bit more just beyond my short bio there. Why don't you take a minute or two, tell our listeners a bit about yourself, your career background, and of course the mission of leadership IQ? Sure.

SPEAKER_01: 1:28

So the mission of Leadership IQ, I'll start with that one, is essentially to go out in the world, study what makes great leaders and great companies better, right? What separates them from everybody else. And then to take whatever those insights are, good, bad, or indifferent, and turn that into practical training to actually go help people. And that's really kind of the thing that gets me out of bed in the morning is the there is, and this doesn't sound great really, but there's so much nonsense out there and so much myth and incorrect thinking about things that what I really wanted to do from kind of the beginning of my career was just go, listen, could we like go study this? Could we look at whether there's actually data, something to back this up? And if there is, then great, let's sort of trust that rather than just making stuff up and you know going on a whim. I don't want to do this stuff capriciously. Could we study a problem and see if there's a solution in the data in there somewhere? And that's really what led to things like hiring for attitude and all of that, is just what's the data actually telling us here?

SPEAKER_03: 2:42

Okay, so let's get into what the data is actually telling us. Um, so some of your research has found that 89% of hiring failures are due to attitude rather than technical skills. Uh, we speak a lot on this part about skills-based hiring and also um uh company fits, culture fits. Why do so many companies, however, still focus primarily on experience and qualifications?

SPEAKER_01: 3:08

Number one is because it's easy. Uh, when you're hiring for skills, skills are so easily testable that, for example, I don't know how to program in Java, but I can hire a Java programmer with no problem because the internet is on computers now. And I can go to the internet and download a test on Java competency, hand a candidate 30 lines of code and say, find the bugs. If I'm hiring a nurse in a hospital, for example, every hospital on earth pretty much does competency fares. They literally have setups where they can go, okay, here's a fetal monitor, show me how to work it. If I'm hiring a financial analyst, I hand them a laptop and go, calculate a weighted average cost of capital. Hiring for skills is easy. And by the way, I would never suggest that we don't want skilled people. My what the data shows is that, yeah, keep hiring, do the skills, absolutely, but that's like table stakes. That's you the bare minimum. If you have the skills, we've also then got to answer the other question, which is the attitudinal part. And and again, the reason why people don't do the attitude nearly as much, why that is still such a major source of hiring failures, is that it's just it takes a little more time and it takes actual interviewing skills rather than just here's the test. I don't I don't have to be a good Java programmer to hire a Java programmer, but I do have to be a good interviewer to assess somebody's fit.

SPEAKER_03: 4:51

Okay, so there's me thinking we've got a popular podcast, and I'm I'm not a bad interviewer. However, um, my first question for you was tell me about yourself, your career background, and so on. And and you're kind of anti those sorts of past stock interview questions. In your opinion, what why do those sorts of questions fail? And what types of questions should HR be asking in an interview situation instead?

SPEAKER_01: 5:16

So the big issue why those questions fail, it's not that they're evil or illegal or anything like that. It's just that things like tell me about yourself, what are your strengths, what are your weaknesses, are literally the most asked interview questions pretty much in the English-speaking world. And every candidate worth their salt has a canned answer to those questions. So tell me about yourself. Well, I'm a I'm a motivated self-starter. I love individual accountability, but you know, I also love working on teams. Wow, that's great. Uh, I don't I don't suppose you have any weaknesses. Well, you know, I I don't like to talk about this too much, but uh I've been told sometimes in the past I I care too much. I, you know, I work too hard, I give too much of myself, and it can intimidate people on the team. And listen, every single person who has ever interviewed has heard some version of those exact canned answers. And the thing is that when you've got limited time in an interview, all we're doing is wasting time. We're not learning anything about the candidate. So listen, are they evil? No. Are they uh damaging? Not really, except that they waste time. And, you know, some people will say, Well, I asked, tell me about yourself as a rapport building question. To which I would say, huh. Imagine you walk into a cocktail party and some stranger comes up and says, So tell me about yourself. That is an insanely off-putting question. If like some rando comes up and asks you that, it's that's not rapport building. Rapport building would be like, oh, did you find a place okay today? How's your day been going? What's the weather like? That's rapport building. And so these questions, they're they're useless, they waste time. You're not doing major harm, but you're just sucking up a lot of energy. And that then begs the question, okay, well, if those questions are not good, what should you ask? And the big question is, well, what kinds of attitudes are you trying to hire for? We know that attitude drives hiring failures. Okay, cool. What are the particular attitudes that you need to assess in your organization? Once you figured that out, and there's a number of ways to do that, but once you know the big attitudes you need to go hire for, your interview questions are basically going to be of the form, could you tell me about a time you faced this situation where that attitude was uh at the forefront? So if I need somebody that if we're in an insanely fast-moving company and I need somebody who can bounce back super quickly from mistakes without batting an eye, I might ask them, could you tell me about a time when you made a mistake at work? And that's it.

SPEAKER_03: 8:11

Okay, okay, thank you. Um I was on your LinkedIn head about call today, uh, and there's a there's a very interesting video that you shared. And uh you start that video by saying if a candidate seems flawless in an interview, that's a red flag. And then you go on to talk about the importance of showing humility. Uh the candidate must must be authentic and show humility in an interview situation. Um why does that matter?

SPEAKER_01: 8:40

The reason it matters is twofold. One is that there, if you ask a candidate, for example, could you tell me about a time you made a mistake at work? There is nobody in real life who has not made a mistake at work. Uh, if we ask the question, could you tell me about a time your idea or opinion was rejected? Listen, if you're doing anything worth doing, there is nobody you will come across that hasn't had their idea or opinion rejected. So given that reality, if you ask somebody that and they say, no, I've I've never made a mistake at work. I I idea or opinion's never been rejected. It says one of two things. One is that either this person is just flat out lying, which is not a particularly good sign, uh, or second, they are suffering from Dunning Kruger, which is the I think I'm amazing and I lack the cognitive wherewithal to know that I'm not amazing. So I basically lack the self-awareness to know that I have made mistakes, which is every bit, if not even more, disturbing. So if a candidate cannot say, and and so those are the two big reasons, but there's a third reason. And it is that if a candidate can't say, yeah, I made a mistake, okay, that's that's a bad sign. Now, the third part of this is in an ideal world, you don't want a candidate that just says, Yeah, I made a mistake. Yeah, it happened last week, and boy, the whole project went to heck after that. Okay. Um, you know, and I I want to say, I'm not gonna ask, did you do anything about it? Because they're kind of giving me the answer already. But what I am thinking is, did you do anything about it? Whereas a great candidate is gonna say, Yeah, I made a mistake a month ago. Here's what happened. Now, once I made that mistake, let me tell you what I did to fix it and what I learned from it as a result. So universally, it doesn't matter what kind of attitude you're looking for, what kind of company you have, growth, the ability to recover and learn from mistakes and move forward and grow from that is a human positive characteristic. So that is one of the major characteristics you would like to see, and you'd like to see it for every single attitude that you can imagine, but you want to see the ability to, yeah, learn from a mistake, because we're all gonna make them, but then grow and evolve from it.

SPEAKER_02: 11:17

Thanks for listening to this episode of the HR Chat Podcast. If you enjoy the audio content we produce, you'll love our articles on the HR Gazette. Learn more at hrgazette.com. And now back to the show.

SPEAKER_03: 11:34

Okay, so I I get that um being authentic, showing that you've got humility is important, of course. But isn't it isn't it more uh this is getting to the neuroscience a bit now, I guess. Isn't it more of an of a natural state that the candidate wants to get the job and then they want therefore they want to put a positive spin on everything? Uh as opposed to most candidates are quite happy to come in and say, yeah, actually, you know what, I failed at this, but I learned these things. Give me your thoughts around that.

SPEAKER_01: 12:06

I'm so happy you asked that. So one of the biggest mistakes that HR leaders and hiring managers in general make is when they ask an interview question, they usually will add words to the end of the interview question that tee up the candidate to they essentially give away the right answer and it tees up the candidate to spin this in a really positive way. So for example, if I ask, could you tell me about a time you made a mistake at work and how did you overcome that? I am instantly telling the candidate, I don't want to hear about your mistakes, really. What I really want to hear is success stories. If you think of it like this, if there are two kinds of people in the world, problem bringers and problem solvers, a problem bringer, if you ask them about a problem, all they will tell you about is the problem. But if you ask a problem solver about a problem, they will tell you about the problem, sure, but they will automatically, with no additional prompting, tell you how they solved it. So one of the big rules in hiring that we've found through the research is never ask a candidate how they solved a problem. Ask them about the problem. You almost, because of what you just said, we have this predisposition to want to cast ourselves in the most positive light. You actually have to essentially nudge the candidate to share negative stuff. So I might ask, could you tell me about a time you made a mistake at work? Cover my mouth and stop talking. Or could you tell me about a time you were asked to do something you didn't know how to do? Cover my mouth and stop talking. I call it leave the question hanging. And you'll notice these questions feel almost awkwardly open-ended. Could you tell me about a time you were asked to do something you didn't know how to do? It's just left hanging, which creates a tension. And you know, musicians would call that if that was a chord, that would be an unresolved chord. You expect like a note to come after that. I want to mimic that same kind of musical composition idea, and I want to leave my question unresolved. So the pressure is on the candidate to now resolve it. I'm basically saying, I'm not looking for the solution now. Half the candidates are going to give me a solution, which is great because they're going to differentiate themselves. But what people tell me after they read the book for the first time, the Hiring for Attitude book, is they go, When I stopped giving away the answers to my questions, the stuff that came out of people's mouths was bananas. And you're just gonna have to trust me on this one. But when you ask somebody, could you tell me about a time you made a mistake at work and stop talking? There are, I promise you, people who will say, Oh, geez, yeah, happened all the time on my last job. I didn't know what I was doing there. It's stunk. That's why I'm interviewing with you guys. Oh, which is fantastic. I mean, it's a terrible answer, and you wouldn't hire that person, but it's great because they instantly revealed who they really are. But we have to stop nudging them and answering the question for them. We need to have just that ounce of discomfort, that tension, where we're leaving it open for them to share the truth, the real stuff that went on.

SPEAKER_03: 15:34

Okay, so is that the biggest mistake that HR pros and hiring managers make in an interview? They they say too much, they they get they give too much away.

SPEAKER_01: 15:43

That would be in the top two or three, absolutely. And, you know, honestly, if for example, if you're doing a uh a uh a video interview, for example, um, you know, especially with the technology that some companies are using these days, they'll have transcripts of it, etc. Literally perform an analysis and do a word count. Just something is incredibly basic. Now you could, you know, who said more words? Do a word count and then calculate the percentage. In an ideal world, an interviewer, take out the beginning part where you're offering them coffee and tea and all of that. Take out the end part that last five minutes where you're giving them a pitch on why your company's so great to work at, and just focus on the part where you're actually interviewing them. The interviewer should be speaking no more than 10% of the time. And when you do the math on that for a second, you know, in a 40-minute interview, that's four minutes. That's not a lot of time. And when you actually run the word count, or you know, if you want to get more advanced, just do it as a percent of time. I mean, you know, we could do it on a podcast like this, for example. It's not hard to the technology is like, you know, kindergarten level stuff these days. If the interviewer is spending, you know, 15, 20 minutes of the interview actually talking, what am I learning about this person? I'm using up this valuable time. I'm trying to make a decision about whether or not I'm gonna spend more waking hours with this person than I do with my spouse. And I'm only got 40 minutes in the best case, and now I'm willingly taking that down to 20 minutes. This is madness. So, yeah, it's big on the list of major mistakes.

SPEAKER_03: 17:38

Is it madness though, or is it learning about the company culture? So, you know, the gen the Gen Z is it's very important for them to study show. Uh that it's very important for them to know and feel that they are gelling with a company culture. And unless you give the interviewer an opportunity to express that company culture and and and differentiate that from others, are those candidates not getting what they need?

SPEAKER_01: 18:07

So, yes, but here's the catch. What you want to do ideally is break your interview into a couple of parts. And so there's the interview part that is explicitly, I am here to learn about you, the candidate. And then there's another part where now you, the candidate, are explicitly learning about me. So when I say an interviewer should be speaking no more than 10% of the time, that's only for the interview part. When we're at the recruiting pitch part, that different story. Now, a big mistake that gets made is that hiring managers will blend this, they'll blend their kind of recruiting pitch throughout the interview part. And so they don't serve either of those needs particularly well. And so what I suggest is that interviewers learn to say something along the lines of listen, I am super excited to get to know all about you. So why don't we do this? And I because I know you want to get to know about us as well. So let's do this. Let's take the next X number of minutes, and I got a bunch of questions because I'm just excited to learn all about you. And then we'll wrap that part, and then we'll move into another part where you can ask anything you've got for me. And if you compartmentalize those two things, now you, as the interviewer, get to go into robust questions, probing deep stuff, and then put a bow and then move into now the let me tell you about us. Ask us anything. Let me talk about the culture and how great we are and all of that kind of stuff. So, yes, you want to do the pitch, but you really want them broken up so that you can serve both needs with an explicit focus and really laser in on, you know, meet the goals. I gotta learn about you, nail it. You gotta learn about me, nail that. Great. Now we're in good shape.

SPEAKER_03: 20:06

In terms of reading reading a candidate, and indeed the candidate reading the interviewer, would you agree that I'm getting a good sense of you? I can't see if you're shuffling your feet under under the table here. I can't see if you're uh you're doing anything with your hands, you're picking it in nails, tells, you know, to show me if you're uncomfortable with a particular uh question that you're being asked. Would you agree that in person, if it's possible for an interview situation, is always more powerful than video?

SPEAKER_01: 20:32

It's and uh really because you get that extra, you get that extra level of information, right? You do get to see the person, um, you do get to make that connection. Face-to-face connections are are always going to be stronger and more powerful than a virtual connection. Um, you know, but when it is remote, you know, as long as you're on video and you've got the audio going and the video solid, you know, it's you can still get you can get done what you need to get done. Um, but yes, if you have your druthers, especially if you're in, you know, say the second round of the interview, you're down to kind of your your final, final list of candidates. Yeah, maybe you don't want to spend the money to sp fly 10 candidates in, but is it worth it for those last two? Yeah, it may very well be, likely would be, depending on, you know, the salary level of the job you're hiring for.

SPEAKER_03: 21:34

So far, we haven't spoken about something which seems to come up in every single interview that I do at the moment, and that's AI. Um, so one thing that I get up to, Mark, when I'm not uh doing the HR Gazette and HR chat podcasts is I run a series of AI summits in in the UK. Um, and this stuff is terribly interesting, and lots of people are going to lose their jobs, and lots of other people are gonna get new jobs that they don't even know about yet. Um, some of those roles might be within recruiting. Uh, are we seeing uh a future of automated recruiting processes based on clever machine learning and large language models, or will it will it always be important to have real people as part of that process?

SPEAKER_01: 22:11

So here's my answer that is tinged with a dose of irony. Um, it is this that notwithstanding, so recruiting has obviously already been impacted by AI. And companies are looking and saying, yeah, you know, what value are the recruiters really adding here? And could we replace that with AI? And the answer is, yeah, in some cases, if recruiting and recruiters haven't demonstrated what value they bring beyond, and I see this in organizations way too much, where the recruiter is basically taking CVs and resumes and putting them into an ATS and just scheduling interviews with hiring managers. Like, where's the value add in that? So could that be replaced with AI? Oh, in a heartbeat. Now, here's the thing though. When it comes to actually interviewing and getting a read on the candidate, as advanced as AI is, and it is advanced, uh, we continually run tests to see kind of how advanced AI is. A good interviewer can still pick up signals that AI cannot pick up, even if you give them transcripts of candidate responses. So record the candidate responses, feed it into AI, and then give it to uh have them analyze it, and then do the same thing with a human, a really good interviewer analyzing the candidate responses. A really good human interviewer can still pick up subtle signals that AI doesn't. For example, um, AI tends to get fooled by candidate responses. Could you tell me about a time you made a mistake at work? Oh, absolutely. You know what? I'm of course, everybody's gonna make mistakes. And you know what? I do tend to approach this with an always learning mindset. So one of my goals is to make sure that whatever mistake happens, that I am always learning. So what I like to do when a mistake happens is I like to actually diagnose it and I like to map out a new set of skills that I'm gonna learn as a result. Now, here's the thing: I asked the question, could you tell me about a time? A time. You personally made a mistake, presumably in the past. And what this candidate gave me was a hypothetical present and future tense verb-oriented nonsense answer that did not actually answer my question. AI can get fooled with responses like that, whereas a really skilled, now lots of lousy human interviewers get fooled by answers like that all the time. But a good interviewer, really well-trained one, does not get fooled by that. They sit back and they go, Canada didn't actually answer my question. They didn't actually give me a specific time. I got a problem here. And so the irony is that even with the increase of AI, there is going to be an increasing need for really talented human interviewers that can pick up on stuff that uh the AI isn't able to yet. And also what it argues for is I am not a fan of asynchronous interviewing, where you give the candidate some questions and then they record a video and send it into you because that's where you can now get the can't the candidate can basically make a script and you're just testing their acting ability. Whereas what we're doing right here in this conversation, you and I, Bill, it's you I you can tell, like we're not pausing to go, okay. Well, let me let me stop. Uh, Bill, you asked a great question. Um, let me type in a response here to GPT and get an answer. Uh oh, here, now I know how to answer. You could tell if I'm using AI, like, there's no way to do it in a human conversation. There's no way for one of us to pull up Chat GPT and go, oh, let me figure out how to answer Bill's question. In the face-to-face or video or phone call, however, we're doing the interview, you can get the human interaction, and it's hard to use AI to game your way through the interview.

SPEAKER_03: 26:26

I was chatting to a professor friend of mine the other week, and I said, How have you guys finally dealt with the fact that all the students are writing their uh their essays uh using Chat GPT or uh Deep Seek or something similar? And she said, Well, it's actually really easy. We figured it out now. Uh we'd we just we just sit them down and ask them a few questions about what they've written, you know. Um if they don't know the answer, then they did not create that. Um, but it seems to be pretty similar in the situation that you just you just mentioned there. And I guess from the other side as well, going back to that company culture piece, describing that to the candidate, how's a chat bot going to do that? You know, they still want to do it in a in a way that uh is probably gonna entice uh a strong candidate to to join a company. Um, I could chat to you about this stuff all day. However, uh these episodes are a particular length for a reason. So before we wrap up for today, sir, how can our uh listeners connect with you and how can they learn more about leadership IQ? And of course, I'm assuming that all of your books are on Amazon and all of the usual places, and they can find them there.

SPEAKER_01: 27:24

Yep, all the books are on Amazon and uh everywhere else you buy books. Uh, and of course, if you go to leadershipiq.com, there's a uh sections on the website. One is called research, one is called quizzes, and there's a bunch of resources there where we get into like word use that candidates use, their verb tenses and pronouns and all sorts of fun, cool stuff to go take a look at.

SPEAKER_03: 27:48

So excellent. And I have just sent you a LinkedIn connection request, uh. So uh hopefully we can connect there too. Uh that just leads me to say for today, Mark Murphy. I've really enjoyed this conversation. I'm definitely gonna badger you for another interview in the near future. But for now, thanks very much for being my guest. Thanks for having me, Bell. And listeners, as always, until next time, happy working.

SPEAKER_00: 28:14

Thanks for listening to the HR Chat Show. If you enjoyed this episode, why not subscribe and listen to some of the hundreds of episodes published by HR Gazette? And remember, for what's new in the world of work, subscribe to the show, follow us on social media, and visit hrgazette.com.