Stop toxic candidates from beating your job interviewsgettyThe most dangerous toxic candidates are rarely the people who spend the interview openly complaining that their last boss was an idiot. Most interviewers can reject that person without much assistance. The harder cases sound optimistic, proactive, collaborative, and even self-aware, while resentment, blame, negativity and a lack of accountability lurk just underneath the polished delivery.Why Toxic Candidates Get Through InterviewsThe landmark study Why New Hires Fail tracked over 20,000 new hires. You’ve undoubtedly heard the statistic that 46% of those new hires failed within 18 months. What’s less quoted, but far more important, is that 89% of those failures resulted from attitude rather than a lack of technical skills.Some weren’t coachable, while others lacked emotional intelligence, had the wrong temperament for the organization or lacked the right motivation.And here's a sobering statistic. When the Hiring For Attitude research asked hiring managers to look back on those types of mishires, 82% said there had been clues during the interview. The candidate used (or avoided) certain words, described former coworkers in a particular way, or gave answers that, in hindsight, predicted exactly what was coming.The Root Cause of Failed HiresLEADERSHIP IQMORE FOR YOUIn other words, the hiring managers heard the clues, but didn’t know what they were listening for.Step 1: Ask About A Mistake, Then Get Out Of The WayOne of the simplest questions for spotting a potentially toxic candidate is: “Could you tell me about a time you made a mistake at work?”That is the entire question. You’re not asking about a big mistake, a serious failure or the worst mistake of the candidate’s career, because each of those descriptions begins shaping the answer before the candidate has said a word.Suppose a candidate says, “It wasn’t really a big deal, but one time I entered the payroll incorrectly and everyone got paid two days late.” The mistake itself is obviously relevant, but so is the candidate’s belief that delaying everyone’s paycheck was no big deal. By leaving the question open-ended, you learn how the candidate personally judges the seriousness of their actions.And don’t ruin the question by tacking on endings like, “And how did you fix it?” or “What did you learn from the experience?”Stop Ruining Your Interview QuestionsLEADERSHIP IQThe report on Words That Ruin Behavioral Interview Questions discovered that a majority of interviewers add that little clause because it seems helpful and conversational. Unfortunately, it ruins the revelatory power of that question because it tells the candidate how to correctly answer. You’ve told the candidate that the story should include a solution, a lesson and presumably a happy ending. Even someone who typically denies mistakes or blames other people now knows exactly which version of themselves to present.Asking only about the mistake creates a totally different dynamic. You’re inviting the candidate to revisit a negative experience and giving them plenty of room to decide where the story goes next.Some candidates will acknowledge the error, explain what happened and automatically describe what they learned and changed afterward. Others will spend most of the answer establishing that the mistake wasn’t really theirs; instructions were unclear, the computer malfunctioned, the department was understaffed, etc. Any one of those explanations might be accurate, but a long pattern of explanations with no personal responsibility should concern you.Questions about mistakes are especially useful for spotting toxicity because they tempt candidates to reveal negativity. A candidate may become angry all over again while describing a former boss, disparage the competence of coworkers or insist that they rarely, if ever, make errors. That information may never appear when the interviewer asks about a proud accomplishment or successful project.Of course, describing a negative experience does not make someone toxic. We’ve all worked with a bad manager or on dysfunctional teams. The concern arises when every mistake becomes somebody else’s fault and every negative experience is still producing resentment years later.Step 2: Listen for Specific Events That Actually HappenedAfter asking for a specific experience, notice whether the candidate actually provides one.High performers generally have detailed stories about their accomplishments because they lived through them and remember what occurred. They can tell you about the customer, the assignment, the person they called, the mistake they made along the way, and the ultimate solution. They might pause while recalling a name or chronology, but their answer contains enough incidental detail to sound like a memory rather than a management textbook.The study The 7 Words That Predict Bad Hires analyzed 20,572 real interview answers, and the language of strong and weak answers was measurably different. High-performer answers were 23% longer, contained 21% more first-person language such as “I,” “me,” and “my,” and used 38% more past-tense verbs.That is what you would expect from someone recounting an experience that actually happened: “I called the customer, reviewed the account, discovered the billing error, and asked our finance manager to correct it.”Candidates who lack a relevant experience often begin as though they are telling a story, then quietly slide from the past into general advice. They might say, “There was one time when a customer had a billing problem,” but before explaining what they did, the answer shifts into, “In situations like that, you should consult a manager,” or, “You could look at how similar cases were handled.” The candidate has stopped describing history and started delivering a lecture.The Words That Are Red Flags In InterviewsLEADERSHIP IQThe difference between “I did” and “you should” is especially important. “I did” provides evidence of behavior. “You should” merely shows that the candidate understands the socially acceptable answer. In the study, low-performer answers used “you” language 392% more often than high-performer answers, the largest difference found in the entire analysis.Verb tense provides another clue. When someone is describing a real experience, past-tense language tends to appear naturally: “I called,” “I reviewed,” “I asked,” or “I discovered.” Low-performer answers, by comparison, used 104% more present-tense verbs and 71% more future-tense verbs.So when an answer consists primarily of “you should,” “I would,” “you could,” and “I will,” the candidate may be describing knowledge or intention rather than demonstrated behavior.None of this means that one use of “would” or “you” proves that a candidate is lying or destined to become a poor hire. People speak imperfectly, especially when they are nervous. Listen for the broader pattern: the candidate repeatedly avoids saying what they personally did, moves out of the past tense, and substitutes abstract expertise for a specific record of behavior.A polished hypothetical can easily sound smarter than a messy true story. That is precisely why interviewers miss this warning so often.Step 3: Notice Where The Candidate Places ResponsibilityDysfunctional organizations exist, bad managers exist, and plenty of good employees have been put into situations in which they lacked training, support or reasonable resources. A candidate does not become toxic merely because they acknowledge those realities.The more revealing issue is whether the candidate can identify any part of the situation over which they had control.Consider two employees who were assigned work without adequate training. The first spends the answer explaining that management never provided the necessary materials, no experienced coworker offered assistance and expectations were unrealistic. The second acknowledges the limited training but then explains how they found an experienced operator, reviewed the manual, researched the issue and/or sought outside instruction.Both candidates experienced a legitimate organizational problem. Only one tells you how they responded to it.Chronic blamers often speak as though events simply happened to them. Every difficulty originated somewhere else, and every disappointing result was imposed upon them.A healthy candidate may criticize a former employer, and sometimes that criticism will be entirely justified, but they can still describe what they attempted and what they learned.This is especially important when candidates discuss mistakes. People with strong accountability do not need to pretend that every error was entirely their fault, but they can usually find the part that belonged to them. They might say that the instructions were unclear and that they should have verified the process before proceeding. They may explain that they felt overwhelmed and made a hasty decision rather than consulting someone with more expertise.The toxic answer works really hard to prove that the candidate technically did nothing wrong.Step 4: Watch For Complaints Disguised As AccomplishmentsSome of the clearest warning signs arrive inside statements that initially sound positive. Imagine a candidate saying, “I got stuck with more tough problems than anyone else because my boss knew I was really good at problem solving.”Most interviewers will notice the compliment: the boss trusted this person with difficult work. But the more revealing phrase is “got stuck with.”The candidate could have said they were given or trusted with challenging assignments. Instead, they describe those assignments as something imposed upon them. The compliment and the complaint occupy the same sentence, which allows the resentment to pass unnoticed.The phrase “more than anyone else” deserves attention as well. Maybe it’s true, but toxic candidates often portray themselves as the one competent person trapped among fools, the only employee who cared or the sole person willing to work hard. Their coworkers become a faceless mass of incompetence while they stand alone as the organization’s unrecognized hero.You might hear statements like:“I was always the person who had to clean up everyone else’s mistakes.”“Nobody on that team cared as much as I did.”“My boss knew I was the only person who could handle the difficult customers.”Each statement could contain some truth. But when this pattern runs through multiple answers and every accomplishment requires the candidate to diminish someone else, that’s a warning sign.The same issue arises when a candidate claims never to have failed, never to have encountered a challenge they could not overcome or never to have received valid negative feedback. Interviewers sometimes interpret these declarations as confidence, especially when they are delivered with energy and a smile.In practice, a person who cannot identify a meaningful mistake may lack self-awareness, or they may be so committed to protecting their image that they cannot discuss one honestly. Neither possibility is particularly comforting.There’s also a practical reason to pay attention to these subtle phrases: the interview is the candidate’s best behavior. They’re actively trying to impress you. If resentment, blame and contempt are visible under those conditions, consider how much more plainly they may appear after six months on the job.Toxic candidates don’t always reveal themselves with an outrageous answer. More typically, they sound capable and positive while quietly showing that they have no specific accomplishments to describe, no mistakes to own and no former coworker or boss they genuinely respect.Ask about a difficult experience without telling the candidate how the story should end. Then listen for what the person actually did, where they place responsibility and whether their proudest accomplishments require everyone else in the story to look incompetent.Mark Murphy is the New York Times bestselling author of Hiring For Attitude and the founder of Leadership IQ.