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.

• 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

In this candid mini-series, 3Peak Group’s Managing Director, Mino Vlachos, and Avomind’s recruiting leader, Shruti Chaudhary, pull back the curtain on how companies really find, evaluate, and hire senior leaders.

From the first screening call to high-stakes executive assessments, Mino and Shruti reveal what matters most when identifying senior talent —a nd what reliably derails even the most impressive candidates. With perspectives from both the consulting and recruiting sides, this conversation is packed with practical insight for CEOs, founders, and growth-stage companies who can’t afford a mis-hire.

If you’ve ever wondered what recruiters pay attention to, what executive assessments actually measure, or why “gut feel” still plays a role, this episode will give you a grounded, inside look.

• What great interviewers really look for– Micro-behaviors that signal humility, emotional maturity, and self-awareness– How candidates reveal red flags without realizing it– Why senior leaders must be able to clearly articulate what they want

• The importance of real dialogue in interviews– Why candidates who ask no questions are a major warning sign– How thoughtful questions demonstrate alignment, curiosity, and commitment– Stories of surprising deal-breakers (including the candidate who walked away over a company car)

• Culture fit, values alignment, and why they matter more than resumes– What recruiters can (and can’t) evaluate– How misalignment shows up early—and why ignoring it is costly

• Executive assessment demystified– How Mino conducts 3–4 hour deep-dive interviews to understand leadership patterns– Why triangulating data—story, testing, references—is essential for predicting behavior– The power of high-quality reference checks (and why ghosting is a giant red flag)

• Cognitive ability, simulations, and the science of prediction– What the research actually says about intelligence and leadership– Why resource-allocation simulations are emerging as top predictors of executive success– How overly high intelligence can hurt leadership efficacy if not paired with communication skills

• Best practices for evaluating senior talent– The non-negotiable importance of a clear job description and defined criteria– How to watch your own evaluative bias as an interviewer– Why the future of leadership hiring will increasingly rely on assessing systemic thinking

In this episode of our four-part mini series on hiring the right senior leaders, Mino Vlachos, Managing Director and Co-Founder of The 3Peak Group, reconnects with Shruti Chaudhary, a global recruitment leader at Avomind, to explore one of the most underrated drivers of hiring success: role clarity.

From the inside of mid-sized organizations and the outside view of global executive recruiting, Mino and Shruti unpack why unclear roles create chaos, why “unicorn hires” almost always backfire, and how expectations shape the entire hiring pipeline—from candidate experience to long-term retention.

Through vivid analogies (including a memorable one about children’s football games), they discuss how organizations drift into heroics, overcompensation, and system breakdown—and what CEOs can do to build roles that are functional, sustainable, and scalable.

If you’ve ever tried to fill a role that secretly contains 16 jobs, struggled to align internal stakeholders, or wondered why a Chief of Staff role keeps becoming a black hole for responsibilities, this episode offers both clarity and practical guidance.

• Clear expectations dramatically improve hiring speed, reduce candidate drop-off, and support healthy onboarding.

• When expectations are vague, misaligned, or contradictory, organizations see stalled searches, unhappy candidates, brand damage, and fast turnover.

• Mino breaks down how organizations slide into systemic compensation: one person covering five roles, teams bending reality, and companies masking structural gaps.

• If you’re backfilling a hero, you’re not hiring a role—you’re recreating dysfunction.

• Startups and even corporates often operate like children chasing a soccer ball—everyone runs toward whatever problem appeared last.

• Mature systems look more like professional teams: defined positions, maintained structure, and coordinated performance.

• Shruti names the top two unicorn roles she sees globally:

• Chief of Staff (the ultimate catch-all)

• Operations leaders (every company defines the job differently)

• These roles often hide organizational chaos, unclear KPIs, and missing org design.

• AI-generated job descriptions remove nuance—real clarity comes only from real human thinking.

• Misalignment between founders, chiefs of staff, and department leads shows up immediately in recruiting conversations.

• If internal communication is messy, the hiring pipeline will be too.

• Founders and CEOs: Spend time understanding the actual role before delegating the JD to HR or AI. Think like a system architect, not a firefighter.

• Hiring Managers & Recruiters: Ask unapologetically direct questions. Get crystal clear about KPIs, stakeholders, and what the role must look like in 6–12 months.

• Internal Talent Teams: When leaders won’t align, facilitate the conversation—don’t skip it. Lack of alignment guarantees downstream problems.

• Shruti: Act as if you were hiring for this role. What would you need to know? Ask every question.

• Mino: Before hiring, understand the role functionally, relationally, and operationally. Improvisation doesn’t scale.