Saw this little Dilbert cartoon recently. It made me think about my experiences of the many CEO's I've dealt with over the years and their involvement in the recruitment process. I always think that having the CEO exclusively interview candidates for jobs is a bad idea. There seems to be a law of physics that the personality attributes required for CEO's are incompatible with a) shutting up and listening and b) resisting the urge to talk about yourself/company/products ad nauseum while not testing/probing the required attributes of the candidate.
Of course there are exceptions, but, on balance I've never met a CEO yet that's had any skill in assessing competence, with most of them it's 100% about seeing themselves (i.e. personality) in someone and acting on "gut feeling", which as we know, is possibly the worst kind of feeling to act on as it's, almost always, wrong or incomplete. I've seen some stupendously bad hires in my time, mostly all made by CEO's against the advice and instincts of colleagues, the best CEO's have invariably recognized this limitation and delegated hiring to others, limiting their involvement to sanity checking and supplying pep-talks into the process.
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