The weakness only shows up when they're interviewing candidatesgettySome of the most famous CEOs in the world are hands-on with hiring. Elon Musk said he'd personally review every SpaceX AI application that clears an initial screen and Mark Zuckerberg spent much of last year personally recruiting AI researchers for Meta. When a role really matters, CEOs step in. They interview the finalists themselves, they gauge whether someone fits the culture, and they sell the candidate on the company's vision.But there's a problem when CEOs interview candidates. And it's a strange one, because it's not a CEO weakness that causes trouble, it's actually an overwhelming CEO strength.The research on CEO personalities consistently shows that they're assertive, verbally adroit, and most importantly, relentlessly achievement-oriented. You'll rarely hear a CEO tell someone, "It's totally fine that you didn't pull it off, just try better next time." CEOs don't just dislike failure, they hate it. And they push everyone around them to overcome it.That drive to achieve is a gift almost everywhere in the business. But in a job interview, it's a liability, because one of the most essential skills an interviewer needs is the ability to sit back and let a candidate fail miserably right in front of them. And watching someone fail is something a CEO's wiring won't let them do.You Need To Let Candidates FailThe attitudes that sink a new hire are exactly the ones you miss when you don't let a candidate fail. The Hiring For Attitude research on more than 20,000 hires found that 89% of hiring failures are attitudinal, not skills-based (attitudes include characteristics like coachability, motivation, and temperament). Those are the traits a candidate only reveals when you leave them room to give a real answer, including a bad one.When new hires fail, it's because of attitude. LEADERSHIP IQMORE FOR YOUWatch how it goes wrong. The CEO asks, "Could you tell me about a time you made a mistake at work?" The candidate says something like, "Yeah, I missed a big deadline on a client project last year. I underestimated how long the build would take, and it slipped." Then the candidate stops talking.To the CEO, that unfinished answer is intolerable. So they jump in. "Well, what did you do about it?" Or, "How did you recover?" Or, "What was your next step?" In the CEO's mind it's almost unthinkable that a person would make a mistake and just sit there, not immediately moving to correct it, learn from it, and turn it into some burst of transformational growth.But the candidate already told you they don't think like that. They made a mistake, they accepted the mistake, and maybe they've quietly accepted that they'll make others like it. It's not the ideal answer. But it's the true answer, and it's exactly the answer you needed to hear. When the CEO leaps in with "well, what did you do," or "how did you overcome that," they're signaling to the candidate that the real answer was unacceptable, and they're coaching them toward a better one. The candidate thinks, "Oh, I guess I'm supposed to reframe this as a win," and so they revise their answer.The CEO just beat the right answer out of the candidate, and walks away impressed by a story they largely wrote themselves.The Five Words That Ruin Interview QuestionsThis doesn't only happen live, in the moment. A lot of the time the answer is already baked into the question, waiting there before the candidate opens their mouth. Here's a common one:"Could you tell me about a time you lacked the skills to complete an assignment, and how you overcame that?"The last five words, "and how you overcame that," hand the candidate the answer to the question. You've just told the candidate you want initiative, learning, and a problem that got solved, so that's the story they'll build, whether it's true or not.Imagine a candidate who has lacked the skills to complete an assignment 100 times. In 99 of those times they waited around for help, blamed the assignment, or turned in weak work. And then one time they actually figured it out. Those five words tacked on to the end of the interview question, ("and how did you solve it"), instruct the candidate to bury the 99 failed examples and tell you about the one rare success. You end up interviewing the best five seconds of someone's career and calling it a pattern.The fix is almost insultingly small. Cut the last five words and stop talking."Could you tell me about a time you lacked the skills to complete an assignment?"This is subtle enough that even seasoned interviewers miss it. When Leadership IQ analyzed real interview questions for the study Words That Ruin Behavioral Interview Questions, the same habit showed up over and over: interviewers tack a few words onto the end that quietly hand over the answer they're hoping to hear.The question will feel awkwardly open-ended, and the candidate may go quiet, but that silence is the whole point. Now the candidate has to decide where the story goes without a roadmap, and where they take it reveals everything you need to know about their attitude.Never Ask Somebody How They Solved A ProblemProblem bringers and problem solvers sound completely different once nobody is coaching them. And the fastest way to tell them apart is a rule most interviewers get exactly backward: never ask candidates how they solved the problem. Just ask about the problem and stop talking.Ask a problem bringer about an assignment they lacked the skills to complete, and they'll spend the entire answer on the problem. The instructions were vague. The manager never trained them. The deadline was unreasonable. The systems were a mess. Then the answer just stops, because in their version of the story the obstacle is the whole story.But a problem solver describes the same difficulty and keeps going without being asked. "I'd never used the software, so I found a couple of tutorials and had an analyst check my first attempt, and I finished it the next afternoon." You never asked them how they solved it. But they volunteered it automatically, because solving it was the point of the story for them.The candidate immediately reveals if they're a problem bringer or a problem solver, and they hand you the answer for free. But only if you don't ask for it. The instant you tack on "and how did you solve it," both candidates know a solution is expected, and the problem bringer gets coached into sounding exactly like the problem solver. The one thing the interview existed to reveal is gone.