Recruiting Right

Promises only bind those who believe them

Evaluating candidates differently — at the ballot box and in the interview room

Hiring a director who promises you 15% margin growth in one year?

Still torn between two tickets for the runoff?

In both cases, the real question isn't "who promises the most," but "who has already proven they can deliver what they're announcing, in a context that looks like yours."

Picture the scene. On campaign posters, or in the flyer stuffed into your mailbox, you're promised the moon: "Zero tolerance for crime," "500 affordable new homes in five years," "Free public transit for all young people," "A city council team more united than ever."

The candidate has a confident smile, a reassuring tone.

A few days later, in the hushed atmosphere of a conference room, you're sitting across from a candidate for a senior leadership role — and they're playing the exact same tune: "With me, your margins will grow 15% in the first year," or "We'll hit our targets because your teams will be united again like never before."

In both cases, the same mechanism is at work: charm, confidence, swagger.

Six months, one year, three years later: the problems persist, the projects drag on, and the promised unity already looks like a trench war. And you find yourself thinking: "He seemed so sincere… He really took us for a ride."

What if the problem wasn't the candidate's dishonesty — or even the candidate — but the method?

The Sincerity Trap

Every time, we fall for the same trick. Whether we're choosing a mayor or hiring a senior executive, we settle for the same criteria: the compelling speech, the confidence, the coherent program that makes you dream, the energy in the room. We lead with soft skills, add up the promised growth percentages, and hand over the keys to the house. We appoint and we sign — carried away by momentum, by the emotion of the moment, simply because it feels "credible."

This is the era of hope-based hiring, and the failure rate is structural.

The Archaeology of Behavior

To break free from this spell, you need to shift your lens. Move from the archaeology of the future to an archaeology of the past. Stop asking "what would you do?" — and implicitly inviting them to "make me dream" — and start demanding answers to "how did you do it?"

The mayoral candidate promises you "a city council team more united than ever"? Don't take their word for it. Dig into their track record for concrete evidence: how did they respond when their previous team was under pressure, what did they do when the ship started taking on water, what were the results, what course corrections did they make?

On any specific promise, three simple questions are enough — whether the candidate is running for mayor or gunning for a corner office:

1. A standout success. In what difficult situation did they turn things around? What did they put in place, concretely? What measurable result came out of it?

2. An owned failure. When things went wrong, how did they react? Did they dodge responsibility, or did they analyze, correct, and bounce back?

3. Cohesion under pressure. Have they ever successfully rallied people with competing interests? Or do they leave behind a trail of mass departures and lasting resentment?

You don't need to be an HR expert or a political analyst for this. A few pointed questions in a meeting or interview, a handful of press articles, a search through public records — that's often enough to start seeing clearly. And here's the surprise: the deeper you dig into past actions, the less you need future promises.

And often, genuine surprises emerge. A less flashy candidate — because they're more measured — can turn out to be of exceptional value, precisely because they have more know-how than show-how.

When AI Does the Investigative Work

(Heads up: don't do this for professional candidates without checking with your DPO first.)

This is exactly what we built at IOD to take things further. Frustrated with the endless cycle of promises from all sides, we developed an AI model capable of conducting a genuine "fictional behavioral interview" on any candidate — staffer, manager, or executive — drawing on the concrete traces they've left across the web, in the press, and in public legal records.

The tool doesn't just catalog successes: it tracks the reality behind the rhetoric, hunts for specific examples of achievement, probes the gray areas, surfaces owned or concealed failures, and flags documented tensions. Working entirely from publicly available information — information anyone can access — it pits the heroic narrative of a campaign flyer or a résumé against the documented facts, allowing you to move from informed-but-sometimes-fuzzy intuition to grounded, factual confidence.

It's no longer about a good impression. It's about an objective analysis of the trajectory, based on the premise that past learning and experience predict future success.

Take the French March 2026 municipal elections as an example. Three slates are competing in a small town, all promising the same things: more social programs, more security, more prosperity. The videos are polished, the platforms are enticing, and the slates are well assembled because everyone knows someone reliable on their list.

• Candidate A, the incumbent: he made a series of compromises to advance projects blocked by the opposition, delivered no sweeping social initiatives, maintained the status quo with tight finances, and failed to bring down the crime rate — despite brokering a framework agreement between the national gendarmerie and the local police. He draws criticism for his alliances and his lack of boldness.

• Candidate B, highly visible in the community: an entrepreneur who organized local events, strengthened the town market, and created jobs through his own businesses. He commands fierce loyalty from his inner circle — and never misses an opportunity to claim that Candidate A colluded with the opposition to push through social housing contracts under dubious conditions.

• Candidate C: no known failures, an unblemished reputation, a certain gravitas rooted in his standing as a local notable. A physician and sharp analyst of local politics, he has a gift for surfacing the damaging details and the blemishes that tarnish political reputations. Diplomatic to a fault — everyone smiles at him — though his pointed barbs have earned him the quiet hostility of the entire political class. He's running on a platform of doing politics differently, of replacing the corrupt establishment.

After a thorough web search — faster still with our tool — the picture shifts. You're no longer voting for the biggest promise, but for the person who has proven they can navigate reality: budget constraints, opposition, unexpected crises, a persistently difficult environment.

Context: The Missing Piece

But even the most impressive track record can mislead if you ignore the context equation.

We tend to look for the ideal candidate — the one who, on paper, checks every box. As if a universal Superman existed, with super-powers for every situation. A candidate may have thrived in a high-growth organization, executing proven playbooks with precision, and then crashed in a turnaround phase — when opportunities dry up and creativity becomes survival. Hiring without analyzing context is like recruiting a sprinter to run a mud marathon.

Before searching for your savior, ask yourself three questions about your own situation:

• What is the real gap between where your organization or community stands today and where you want it to be?

• Is that gap actually bridgeable with the resources and broader context you actually have?

• What specific capabilities are needed to close this gap — not someone else's?

The method is no longer about recruiting a profile type, but a problem-solving capacity matched to your context. The question is no longer "is this the best profile?" — but rather "is this the right profile, right now, given our specific constraints?"

What the Research Says

This isn't just common sense: it's backed by decades of research.

Meta-analyses in work psychology consistently show that methods based on past behavior predict future performance far better than conventional interviews, platform promises, or subjective impressions. Poorly structured interviews — where questions are asked but answers are evaluated by gut feel — produce validity scores in the 0.20–0.30 range. A structured interview, built around concrete past examples and scored against a standardized rubric, climbs above 0.50, and even higher for management and senior leadership roles.

The reason? The best predictor of what someone will do tomorrow is what they did yesterday, under similar conditions. Promises and declarations, by contrast, are nothing but intentions — and intentions alone predict poorly, with reliability in the 0.10–0.20 range.

In practical terms, evaluating on documented facts rather than words doubles or triples the reliability of your decision. You don't eliminate error — but you reduce it so significantly that whether you're hiring a manager or electing a mayor, ignoring this approach means consciously choosing a less accurate compass.

Recruiting Right: An Act of Clarity

In the end, moving beyond conventional methods requires neither bureaucratic complexity nor major investment. It demands intellectual discipline — and the willingness to trade the comfort of an inspiring speech for the rigor of factual analysis.

The providential candidate doesn't exist. There are only individuals whose past trajectories, once tested against the reality of your specific context, offer a better-than-average probability of success.

Now, whenever I read a campaign platform, a flyer, or a résumé — whether it's loaded with superlatives or cloaked in the appearance of sober, rational language — I ask myself one question:

"What if, instead of listening to what this person promises, I looked at what they've already done — and in what context?"

The next time a candidate promises you the moon, don't ask whether they're sincere. Ask whether they've already figured out how to build a rocket.

When it comes to promises, there's always another way to evaluate a person — and once you start using it, you never go back.