Interviewing for Skills and for Identity

i.About the book

Interviewing for Skills and for Identity is a working guide to the two kinds of evidence a senior hire turns on. Capability is what a person can do — it leaves traces: results, artifacts, verifiable episodes, observable performance. Identity is who the person is such that the doing happens — motivation, values, relation to authority, what a possible future means to them. The two require different evidence, collected by different methods, and the book's central claim, argued from the failure data, is that most executive hiring fails because it runs one process for a two-register problem.

Across twenty-five chapters and an appendix it builds the machinery for both. Part I states the claim and the evidence standard. Parts II and III construct the capability register — track-record forensics, hard-skill interviewing, and a working taxonomy of the executive soft skills, each with its probe architecture, red flags, and scorecard anchors. Part IV builds the identity method: decisional evidence, the meaning of the move, and what only references outside the room can see. Part V assembles both into a signed, challengeable recommendation and the calibration log that corrects it over time.

Every chapter closes with a working instrument and a section titled Where the rules run out: what the method cannot see, where the evidence is thin, what remains inference. Every evidence claim carries a grade, and an appendix maps the legitimate and illegitimate uses of AI in the workflow. One caveat the cover cannot carry: identity here is never demographic identity, never personality typing, never diagnosis — it names a candidate's recurring motivations and non-negotiables as they bear on one particular organizational world, and nothing else.

ii.Why this book matters for KiTalent’s research

Published by KiTalent Research, the book is the practitioner counterpart to the firm's research corpus. Where Executive Search as Erfahrung and the position papers argue, from first principles, that a profile is not a person and that fluent representation is not judgment, this book turns that conviction into method: what to ask, what to verify, what to write down, and what to sign.

It is the firm's operating discipline stated as procedure. Capability can be represented and partly automated; identity cannot, and it emerges only through evidence gathered by a person who can be held to reasons. Mapping runs at speed because availability is time-bound; assessment runs at deliberate pace because judgment is what determines whether a senior placement holds. The book gives that discipline its instruments.