Episode Notes

In the final installment of their four-part mini-series, 3Peak Group’s Managing Director, Mino Vlachos, and Avomind’s recruiting leader, Shruti Chaudhary, dive into the messy, overlooked, and often uncomfortable side of hiring senior leaders.

From unspoken biases to emotional derailers, they reveal the red flags that companies and candidates rarely talk about—but that shape the success or failure of every executive hire. Drawing on Mino’s background in executive assessment and Shruti’s global recruiting experience, this episode offers a practical, unfiltered look at what truly breaks a hiring process—and how to prevent it.

If you’re a CEO, founder, recruiter, or candidate looking to understand how high-stakes hiring really works, this conversation is packed with insight you won’t hear anywhere else.

Episode Highlights

• The biggest mistakes companies make when hiring senior leaders– Hiring under pressure from investors or timelines– Over-prioritizing hard skills over cultural or values alignment– Vague definitions of “culture” that invite bias and mis-hire risk

• What great candidates always do (and poor candidates never do)– Prepare deeply: researching the company beyond its website– Show self-awareness, humility, and ownership of past mistakes– Avoid bad-mouthing previous employers or colleagues– Ask meaningful questions to signal curiosity and alignment

• Clear deal breakers recruiters notice immediately– No questions during the interview– Over-focus on compensation or logistics– Arrogance masked as confidence– Disrespect toward interviewers or team members

• The hidden drivers of leadership failure: emotional regulation & stress behavior– Why a calm “weekend personality” isn’t enough to predict leadership effectiveness– How stress can transform even high-performers into risky hires– Why “I don’t have emotions” is a major red flag– The critical distinction between everyday stress and crisis-induced derailers

• How to evaluate stress responses in interviews– Questions that reveal self-awareness and emotional resources– Identifying leaders who lack intentional stress-management practices– Recognizing chronic stress behaviors, even without a triggering event

• Biases that distort hiring decisions—often without anyone noticing– Affinity and similarity bias: hiring people who feel “just like us”– Network-based shortcuts that clone the founder’s background– Pedigree bias toward elite institutions or brands– Recency bias that overweights a candidate’s last role– Gendered language and screening processes that filter out talent unintentionally

• Practical strategies to reduce bias and elevate hiring quality– Blind résumé reviews (removing names, schools, demographic indicators)– Structured interviews and well-defined criteria– Reviewing conversion rates between hiring stages to spot hidden bias leaks– Creating job descriptions that use neutral, inclusive language

• Final takeaways from Mino & Shruti– Screen for emotional regulation as a core leadership competency– Structure your hiring process to limit bias at every stage– Prioritize clarity, intentionality, and alignment over speed

Transcript

Mino Vlachos: Hello, my name is Mino Vlachos and I am the managing director and co founder of the 3Peak Group. With 3Peak we work with CEOs of mid sized companies to support them during their growth phase. So we help them to scale from a relational system where everyone knows everyone to an organized system where we enable organized structures but maintaining human connection.

Shruti Chaudhary: Hi everyone, I'm Shruti Chaudhary. I am part of Avomind. I lead the dark team within our mind. We are a boutique recruitment firm focusing on commercial strategy and analytics talent globally. We love working with companies that are looking to expand into new areas, looking for very niche roles or scaling up very, very quickly. Speed is our core value and we work globally. We have teams based in Berlin, Jakarta, Barcelona and Toronto. We do come with a very extensive global network and I'm super happy to be here.

Mino Vlachos: Wonderful. And what I love about us working together, Shruti 3 Peak Avomind is we get to see similar topics but from two very different angles. So we support with consulting companies and some of the kind of inner decision making and capabilities that they're building. And then Avomind is really helping with their recruitment and supporting them to find the right talent. And so our mini series is going to be focused on finding the right senior leaders. So one of the core competencies and needs of organizations as they're building and growing is finding the right senior leaders. So we're going to break this mini series into four parts and we're going to be looking at four different components when it comes to finding the right senior leaders. This is our last installment of our mini series, four out of four. So we've been talking about how to find the right senior leaders and today we're going to be talking about the deal breakers, the biases, the dark side of the kind of hiring process and trying to support companies and individuals who are looking to get a new job to what to look out for some of the red flags that happen in the process. So let's start with kind of company side of things. So organizations, they're going out, they want to find someone. What are some of the mistakes that you've seen, Shruti, when it comes to the mistakes that can be made in the kind of recruitment or interview process from the company side.

Shruti Chaudhary: So we talked about this previously as well, but I think the most common mistake that organizations make is not defining who they want and why do they want this person. So that's of course the most common one and we've spoken about it in the previous Episodes as well. Another very common challenge I would say that I see is especially more relevant for startups is giving in to the pressure, the time pressure, the investor pressure. And that can be a tricky one. Like you said, hiring too early could be risky. Hiring too late is also super risky. So finding that right balance. But irrespective of the situation, it should not be purely because of some sort of pressure that an organization hires. There has to be a real need for this person to be on board and for this person to come and create an impact and for this person to grow also. That's something that's very common with a lot of organizations. Another one is focusing a bit too much on hard skills or technical skills and not focusing on the alignment. And this is where I feel a lot of bias automatically creeps in, because when you see someone who's done exactly what you want in your organization, they've done that in the past, they've done it amazingly well, they fit perfectly on paper. So you really want to hire that person as soon as possible. But that's not something that should happen. Ideally, there should be significant focus on alignment, values, culture. Those are important things. And lastly, I would say not defining these slightly, for the lack of a better word, slightly unclear or vague concepts like culture, it's not easy to define it, but it is important that you have some benchmark or a good idea of what you're looking for when it comes to culture.

Mino Vlachos: And what about on the candidate side? So I know, I'm sure you meet with a lot of people, you get to really see humanity in its fullness. What are some of the things that you're kind of looking out for?

Mino Vlachos: And this might be interesting also for candidates to hear so that they can avoid if there's certain patterns or certain things that maybe they're doing unintentionally. But what are you screening for when you're doing some of your interviews?

Shruti Chaudhary: Well, it depends on what the organize. So right now I work with multiple different organizations and I try to understand what each organization is looking for. For some of them, technical skills is all they care about. So some of them, they want someone who is super humble, who can listen, who can take feedback in. For somebody, they need like a confident, assertive person. They're looking to get more structure in the organization. So it depends on the case to case basis. From a candidate's perspective, I would say always do your own research or homework. So to say, read up about the company, look at what employees are saying about it, and not just like you Know the company's website, but look at other sources. That's. That's an important one. And that, that will give you a clear picture of what the organization is about, what the culture is about, what to expect. So that's an important one for any candidate to consider when they're going for an interview. Be yourself. You tend to mold your behavior. It won't last long. Sooner or later, things will come out and it won't be in anybody's benefit. So just be yourself. Be true about what you're doing, what you're saying. Give a clearer picture.

Shruti Chaudhary: General characteristics. For me, being open and open about your mistakes that you've made in the past. Nobody's perfect. I don't think the organizations that are hiring are also looking for like 100%, except the unicorn rules, of course. But. So it's important that you kind of own up to your past experiences, mistakes, take responsibility, don't bad mouth other people, other organizations. That's very, very common in the. And that's. And that happens unknowingly for a lot of people. They tend to take situations, go and go into depth, and that does not give a good impression at all. That's. That's definitely one of those.

Mino Vlachos: Are there, like, red flags, deal breakers that you're like, okay, this is, this is just. We're gonna end this process. Like, this is not the right person, right.

Shruti Chaudhary: Not the right candidate, not asking questions. A very common one. If you come into an interview, you just listen all hunky dory, smiley. You didn't ask one single question. Probably not the right fit or too much focus on aspects like compensation or, you know, will I get travel reimbursement or not? I'm not saying these are not important. You should definitely touch upon these topics as well. But these should not be the only topics on your mind when, especially for a leadership role, you're speaking with someone. And that's, again, a fairly common one to look at. And I think one thing is definitely. I don't know if arrogance is the. Is the right word. And of course, like you said, everything should have a benchmark. So there can be a very thin line between being confident, assertive, and being arrogant. And.

Shruti Chaudhary: It'S important for the person to.

Shruti Chaudhary: Have some level of respect for whoever they're speaking with.

Mino Vlachos: And in general, yeah, I spent. I mentioned this in the last kind of mini episode we had where I spent a lot of time in executive assessment. So I worked a lot kind of assessing people. And one of the things that I had developed at the last company I was at before I started my own consulting company was I basically was looking, looking at, at what point is this person's contribution versus the risk? Like, like is there too much risk in hiring an individual? And one of the kind of key things that I was looking for in like when I would say I do not recommend this candidate, I do not recommend this leader for hiring for promotion is. And I try to kind of find a way to explain this. When we're like in our day to day life and we're, let's say a little bit more relaxed or it's like a weekend, we have something called a personality. A personality. Basically behaviors we tend to repeat or values we tend to kind of try to go for again and again and again. And we all have these different spectrum of personality. So oftentimes, like in the last episode we're looking, we're talking about like, what do you look for? And I was like, oh, you could do an assessment of personality and see if that personality is a good fit. That's a bit half of the picture because our personality is just one side of how we behave. There's also how we behave under stress. Stress tends to completely change how we behave and how we kind of operate. And so one of the ways that we see leaders fail and we call it they kind of derail, is that they start operating under stressful conditions and their personality seems to completely change. And so you say like how people say like what's the real, who's the real person? I'm like, well they're both the real person. Just one is like when they're not stressed and one is like when they are stressed. It's still the same person, the same brain, the same, still like executive function. But stress for all of us warps how we're able to actually function. So one of the things that I really look at is first is how does someone manage their emotions and their stress. So this is like a key component of leadership because if you don't get chronically stressed, then we won't see stress behaviors arise. Or if you're able to regulate or manage your emotions. So again, this old world, old school corporate thing of like hide your emotions, control your emotions. I don't have emotions. For me, that's an instant like deal breaker. Because if you say I don't have emotions, I'd say then you have no self awareness of what's happening within you on a biological physiological level. And I do not then trust that you can actually regulate your stress or even you're Even aware that you're stressed. So more and more my emphasis is on this emotional regulation piece. But we're humans, so we will be tipped into stress at some point. And then the question is, under stress, how severe is someone's reaction under stress? And what types of stress responses and stress behaviors come out? And I think that's a very important part of the assessment process. And that's where I would say there's like the deal breakers start to come out.

Shruti Chaudhary: And I have a question for you over there. Are there some tools or practices that I can use as a recruiter to evaluate this aspect? How is a person going to react to stress?

Mino Vlachos: So short of doing some, there's some really nice testing you. Again, personality tests that approximate this, I would, I would ask some questions around, like, what are some of the intentional practices they have around stress management? And if they don't have intentional practices, then you start to be like, okay, so someone's not, you know, they don't have certain tools because these are skills that are developed over time. You can ask questions around, like, when you are under stress, like, how do you tend to behave? Or how would I. Or you can even ask, how would I know you're stressed? You know, and start to ask people to try to gain some kind of awareness of, like, what's the difference between their like, relaxed weekend self and like, what happens when like, you're. And one of the things, again, it doesn't have to be a crisis. It doesn't have to be like a big shock or a big surprise. A lot of people at work are chronically stressed. So you still end up getting the stress behaviors, even if it's not a big shock. Sometimes if they're chronically stressed in their work, you could still end up having the derailers come out.

Shruti Chaudhary: Interesting. What do you have to say about many leaders not being aware of this aspect of their personality? They do not. So especially if they're chronically stressed and it's not this outlying incident, they probably don't even realize they're behaving a certain way.

Mino Vlachos: So we can try and connect them. So this is where it depends if we're working with them. A lot of the work I do these days is more development focused. So I'm not as much on the selection recruitment side of things. So if I'm within a company, then what we try to do is work with leaders to connect with what we call inner resources. So there are times, even if you are not able today to feel less stress, you can connect to moments in your life or other moments where you have experienced things like peace, contentment, joy, happiness. And by relying on different resources in our psychology, we can allow individuals to access different states. We can use tools like meditation, mindfulness, breathing, emotional processing, so labeling emotions. So there's a lot of things we can do to work with people so that they shift out of this and then they themselves like, like they breathe and you can see this shift in them where you can notice like, okay, this person's like actually exiting the, the stress state. And then they can themselves articulate. Like an exercise I've done in workshops is have people connect with a memory where they could really just be their authentic, true self outside of work and have them share the feelings, like how they feel in that moment. And then like, what were they doing? What was the behavior? And because it was a nice memory, you usually get a lot of expressions of like, I felt free. I felt, you know, like playful. I feel adventurous, productive. And then you can do a different exercise thought experiment where you're like, okay, you go into a workplace where like a person, you're. There's a new boss, they're a dictator. You can't be yourself. If you say anything, you're going to get fired. Like, you have to like, comply only to their standards and be like super rigid. And like, and then what do people say? Like, I feel angry, I feel shut down, I feel depressed, I feel horrible. How would you be at work? I would quit. I would do a strike. I would, you know, I would like, make many mistakes. Like, so there's like, it's, it's a very intuitive process where people can start to identify like their stress versus their non stress. And though if we're not talking on a selection recruitment side of things, like, yes, I would screen for. And like, I don't know if it's harsh, but like, if like right now I have my own company. I'm the founder of my own company. I have a mission with my company. My company is to support regenerative companies to scale. That's my company's mission. I am not a personal development company. So when you come as an employee of mine, I will do everything I can to support you to do the job. But I am not there in service of your kind of like therapy. Like, it's not, I'm not a therapist. I'm not. So if at some point you are unable to regulate your own emotions, your own stress, I would start to like, wonder, is this the right fit? Is this the right environment for you? Is there Someone somewhere else where you, maybe you'd be less stressed or are there some like other skills or coping mechanisms you need to develop? But me, as a startup, I am not a training ground for, for better, for worse. Like I don't have the resources to give people therapy. So it's a weird thing and maybe it's callous or it's not very politically correct. But I would say like for me, I would screen for stress response. I would say this is something that is, will protect your company if people are like. Because that's where you see a lot of the like explosive behavior is stress behavior. Whether it's someone like it's like the fight flight, freeze response. And we're humans. So there is some tolerance and some even room for all of that. But if it's destructive to the company, like there's only a certain point that like you can, like if someone's stealing from you or hitting someone, like there's only a certain point you can allow certain, or you don't allow any of that because it's not okay to have certain range of behavior. And I typically think that's like a stress induced behavior.

Shruti Chaudhary: True. And I think that's all the more important for leaders because their responses and reactions are at some level going to reflect with who they lead as well.

Mino Vlachos: Yeah.

Mino Vlachos: It'S tough because now we're really talking about like the range of humanity, the range of human behavior and emotions and, and what is the role of companies and leaders and bosses. And so it's like a whole philosophical topic that like I won't open up. But to your point, like we're working with an organization right now, a CEO that they're really trying to, to understand and put in place a policy around like personal relationships in the workforce. So like what is, like, what is the tolerance of like romantic, you know, relationships in, in the workforce? And it's a, it's a natural human thing. It's so beautiful. If you talk to me outside of work week, I could write you poems and it's beautiful. But in the workplace, if we are here for a mission or for a purpose, then like maybe this isn't the place to have a personal relationship of that caliber and that degree. Even if that sounds harsh. Like, and this is where again, roles, I think roles are important. Like expectations are important, clarity is important so that we can like, yeah, like what is going to be here and not here?

Shruti Chaudhary: What are some of the most common biases that you come across in your experience? Super common. Maybe that get missed out very Easily both from organizations and leaders.

Mino Vlachos: This perspective I think you mentioned in a previous episode. But one of the biggest ones is the, is the, is like I'm a, I'm like this person. So the similarity bias, the affinity bias, right? Like I like this person, they're like me. That tends to be a really strong one. I would also say, I think there's quite a bit of a bias in like if you don't have like a recruiter like yourselves like Avomind, you tend to source from your network. And that also tends to be a big bias because it ends up being a similar thing where you end up just hiring people from very similar backgrounds as yourself or similar wealth income, like wealth income personality. So you replicate and duplicate like yourself many, many, many times within the organization as a founder or CEO. And there, there is an inherent danger to that because you want people with different expertise, different skills. Like, otherwise like, you know, yeah, why hire anyone? Because you could just do the whole show yourself. Like you really want diversity of backgrounds and thinking in your organization. Even from like a risk management standpoint, just make sure like we can see and anticipate things because someone has a voice that's different than mine. So we need, we need this kind of element. Those are like, I mean there's many cognitive biases we have as human beings. But I would say in like the hiring process on my side, I think that's like one of the biggest ones. So when you put in structure, when you put in some like data, like you should look at things especially as you get larger. So I've worked with like a, consulted some large organizations and you can start to see like if they have like a 10 step process and if you start step one and it's like kind of a representative sample of your population and then like let's say you have 50, 50 men and women. Step two, 50, 50 men and women. But step three, it goes 95, 5, 95% men, 5% women. Then like there's something that happened in step three that I would question. Like what happened in that moment in time. So it's, it's important to look for biases because ultimately like you're not going to get the best talent if there's steps of the process that have biases. So your company as a whole might not have a bias, but even steps might have. Or the way you write the job description, like we've seen that like gendered language in job descriptions drastically impacts who applies for the role. So there is a lot of, I think nuance that needs to be paid attention to if you want to get the best people for your organization yourself. What biases do you see?

Shruti Chaudhary: I think the recency bias is also a very common one. You, when you speak with a person, what they've done most recently kind of always takes more importance or carries more weightage in your evaluation as compared to what they've grown from or what they've experienced in the past. So that's very, very common. A lot of organizations also have biases towards pedigree or backgrounds. That's a very common one. Especially if you go to big corporates, a certain university or certain college companies, they want to do the copy paste as it is, right? Like just bring this person from there to here and this person can solve for it. That's very common. And I think that also kind of affects opportunity for a lot of people. I think. Yeah, these are some of the common ones that I've come across. And what helps me at an individual level is to articulate and document things in as much detail as I can. Leave it aside for a little bit and come back maybe sometime later and review it. And you'd automatically have a more logical or a more rational thought to get to the solution.

Mino Vlachos: Yeah, if I even jump. Now we've been ending these series like one piece of advice, I'm going to jump to mine because it builds right off of what you shared, which is like there are, and, and if you have a very, you know, hire HR folks because HR folks tend to already practice these things and hire great companies like Avomind, they tend to practice these things. But like there are a lot of biases because humans, we make a lot of mental shortcuts. We, we jump to quick conclusions. But even like cvs, like in CVS you can do kind of like blind screening. So you can remove the names, you can remove the, like the name of the school because we, we've seen country after country, even the name of the candidate biases people who are hiring. Right? So remove the name of the candidate maybe and just look at, look at it. Remove the name of the university and look at that resume when you put your job description out. Like even if you are using AI, like ask, like try to look for gender neutral language in the job description so that you encourage a greater candidate. For me the goal is get the, the, the, like the highest quality and the most quantity of high quality candidates to apply for the role. Like you want to have really good people applying for your jobs, right? And then from there you can screen and vet but if you do that, you need to eliminate the bias. Look at the steps of the process and see are there weird things that start to happen with like demographics? Like is there a point in the process where like for whatever reason, like all the women got filtered out of the process. You should check that and check what, what, what's happening at that moment. And then the final step for me, and this is again this is probably my bias just because this is the role I was playing, is like do screen for some of the kind of like, like stress behaviors and some of the ways that people could act out and can they manage pressure, can they manage challenge, can they regulate themselves? Because ultimately this is where you see individuals burning out. They have kind of negative impacts on the organization. Like a lot of these, a lot of things could be I think avoided if, if we all were able to have the resources to kind of manage our emotion. And also we screen for some folks that maybe aren't the right fit because of their emotional response to things in the moment. What's your key piece of advice? Shruti?

Shruti Chaudhary: I was going to say one key takeaway for me from this conversation would also be to focus on how somebody reacts to stress. I think I'm going to focus more on that when I speak to more people. Now from my side, I would say.

Shruti Chaudhary: Internally assess and identify where there is scope for bias on your process, any organization's interview process, and then try to structure it in a way that it can be avoided to the extent possible. Of course it's not like 100% but as much as possible try to structure the process in a way that there is little bias. That's what I would say.

Mino Vlachos: And so that concludes our four part series on hiring the right leaders. We went through episodes on when's the right timing, how to create the right kind of roles and structures, what to look for, what to not look for, what to avoid in this last one. And so our hope and intention is that through this series we provide some insights on how on the recruitment side, on the consulting side, how we kind of look at the best way to find the right talent for your organization. And so with that we're going to conclude this series in this episode. Thank you for listening.

Shruti Chaudhary: Thank you so much everyone.