Spot these devastating hires before they sabotage your team.
We do a lot of painstaking due diligence to ensure we make good hires and bring aboard the right people into our firms. We do things like forensic behavioral interviewing, personality profiling, technical screens, careful reference checking, character assessments, etc. These practices have value; I’m not here to disparage them at all (though, at times, they can be over-prosecuted in my opinion). They can certainly help us to screen out some really bad apples, but they’re not infallible – at least, not last I checked. I think we can lean too heavily on these selection tools at times and, in doing so, fail to spot a potentially bad hire that can only be seen with the naked eye and some good old-fashioned human intuition.
Perhaps the most destructive personality trait to infiltrate our firms is narcissism. You know the type – it’s the person walking around with a headful of themselves and an inflated sense of their own importance and superiority. Secretly, they have a deep relentless need for excessive attention and admiration, and so they constantly carry around this grandiose view of themselves while simultaneously minimizing rivals to their ego by condescending to everybody around them. They lack any decent measure of authentic empathy for others because they’re too self-absorbed to be bothered with something as paltry as empathy.
Now, the scary thing is that if there’s any personality type that can evade all our sophisticated screening tools, it’s this insidious creature. You see, because on the surface, the narcissist is usually incredibly personable, even captivating – even charming. But don’t be fooled; this facade holds only as long as everything goes his or her own way. As someone once aptly said, “Nobody is more charming than a narcissist, so long as you’re reacting to life on his terms.” Ain’t that the truth. The moment the spotlight shifts or their ego is challenged, the true nature of the narcissist emerges, and the consequences for your team or firm can be very severe. I suspect many of you know exactly what I’m talking about.
Why narcissists should be avoided at all costs. There are several good reasons why narcissists should be avoided, and all of them are obvious, but for the sake of inspiring new defenses allow me to recite a few big ones. Firstly, narcissists are incredibly destructive to a firm’s culture because their self-absorbed behavior creates a fog of toxicity around them as they prioritize their own needs, gains, and ambitions above those of the team. The result is polarization, internal conflict, reduced team cohesion, reduced morale, bitterness, drama, stress, etc. It gets worse. As mentioned, the narcissist is driven by an unrelenting need for admiration and validation. So much so that they can’t set any vision on the best interests of the firm, and so they tend to make self-serving and poor strategic choices. Perhaps most toxic, the narcissist believes everyone should carry the same opinions they do, and if you don’t, you’re some breed of idiot. They are relentlessly dogmatic and condescending creatures who are unwilling to consider new ideas that do not originate from them. They stifle and suppress every climate of innovation, and they militantly resist any personal feedback or constructive criticism.
Truth be told, despite all their dogma, condescending behavior, and outward confidence, the narcissist is haunted (consciously or subconsciously) by a fragile ego and an unstable self-image that is highly sensitive to criticism or perceived slights. Their inflated self-image is ultimately a defense mechanism deployed as a means of avoiding confronting their own secretly known flaws and insecurities.
How to spot a narcissist. Spotting a narcissist in a job interview is not easy. Like I said, they can be incredibly personable, captivating people. But there are tell-tale signs and cues that if carefully observed and calculated can effectively remove all that charming and deceptive veneer. Here are my four go-to cues to keep an eye out for during the interview:
- Loud self-promotion. Narcissists love to talk about themselves (no surprise there), often with elevated volume and exaggerated speech related to their own achievements and abilities. They may even dominate the interview with anecdotal stories of their personal successes (usually eliminating any reference to their former failures).
- Laser self-focus. In my experience, narcissists will usually show very minimal interest in the firm beyond how it benefits them (their advancement, compensation, benefits). Their questions about the firm’s history, values, mission, etc., will be few or gratuitous. Furthermore, the answers they give to your questions won’t usually express consideration for team-oriented contributions to previous successes or any kind of collaborative successes. Their focus is dominated by “I” toward their personal gains and individual achievements.
- Name-dropping. This cue is virtually fail-proof. You show me a candidate who does a lot of name-dropping in an interview, or who boasts about some “prestigious” connection they have, and I’ll show you a classic narcissist looking to their affiliation with status symbols as some bizarre external validation.
- Dogma and superiority. Another fail-proof cue. As mentioned, narcissists believe they have intellectually “arrived” on whatever their subject matter expertise is (regardless of what measure of expertise it might be) and that everyone around them is some breed of bumbling lesser-evolved idiot. Listen closely for opinions presented in condescending, overly animated tones and as unchallengeable truths.
Don’t be charmed, don’t be fooled. A narcissist in any organization is a nightmare and a culture killer. Avoid them at all costs. No matter how affable and charismatic the candidate may be, keep your guard up and your eyes peeled by knowing these four reliable cues and by asking the kinds of probing questions that can remove the veneer and dig deeper into the candidate’s true experiences, motivations, and attitudes.
Jeremy Clarke is chief operations officer at Zweig Group and the CEO of Emissary Recruiting Solutions. Contact him at jclarke@zweiggroup.com.
