A Sheep in Wolf's Clothing

Let’s talk about the most dangerous kind of candidate you’ll ever meet.

Not dangerous because they’re toxic.
Not dangerous because they’re incompetent.
Dangerous because they’re… extremely impressive in the exact ways most interviews are terrible at measuring.

They are:

• Smart.

• Articulate.

• Polished.

• Fast on their feet.

They can run rhetorical circles around you.
They understand context lightning fast.
And—this is the scary part—they instinctively know how to reverse engineer the traits you're looking for and feed them back to you, gift-wrapped.

These are the candidates that get people saying things like:

“I just really liked them.”
“They had a great presence.”
“Really sharp—impressive communicator.”

And guess what? None of those things are red flags.
They’re just not data.

Because while the interview medium over-rewards these traits, it under-rewards the stuff that actually moves the needle:

• Do they push through obstacles?

• Do they do unglamorous work when needed?

• Can they get the ball over the line?

• When they hit a wall… do they climb it?

These are the traits that separate top 10% performers from the rest.
And you cannot intuit them from intelligence or communication style alone.

In fact, those two things (smarts + comms) are camouflage for deeper flaws.
They hide the absence of grit, drive, and actual execution.
And they let weak performers get waved through by even the most well-intentioned interview panels.

So what do you do?

You get out of the medium.

Stop vibing.
Stop judging in real time.
Stop asking compound, leading questions that telegraph the "right" answer.

Start gathering raw data.

Force yourself to ask:

• What did they actually do?

• How do I know that?

• What did success look like?

• What evidence do I have they’ve done that before?

Great interviews aren’t performances. They’re investigations.

And the most dangerous candidate is the one who aces the performance but bombs the investigation—because you never ran one.