In this presentation, Mark Murphy recounts the famous Southwest Airlines interview test where candidates were asked to wear ridiculous brown shorts, using it to illustrate how a simple attitude test (sense of humor) can separate candidates. He then shares findings from a three‑year study of over 20,000 hires, revealing that 46% of new hires failed within 18 months, but only 11% of those failures were due to lack of skills; 9% were attitude‑related (coachability, emotional intelligence, temperament, motivation). Murphy explains why companies struggle to fix attitude hiring: (1) interviewers unintentionally give away answers by phrasing questions that lead candidates to only share successes; (2) interviewers cannot reliably distinguish good from bad answers; (3) linguistic analysis of 20,000 real interview responses shows low performers use more second‑person pronouns, present/future tense, and absolute words, leaving a detectable “attitude fingerprint.” He demonstrates a typical poor answer that sounds impressive but lacks concrete actions and is full of absolutes, showing how most interviewers would mistakenly rate it highly. Finally, Murphy offers a solution: designing interview questions that reveal the desired attitudes, providing an answer key, and training hiring managers to spot the linguistic cues, thereby reducing bad hires and their costs.
Chapters
Hi, I'm Mark Murphy, author of Hiring for Attitude. And let me tell you just a quick story about what Southwest Airlines used to do to pilot candidates. They'd bring in 20 of these pilots into a room, you know, very sharp, serious people, white shirt, black tie, black spit-polished dress shoes, black over-the-calf dress socks. And a recruiter would stand up holding a pair of ridiculous brown polyester shorts. And they'd say, "We're a customer service company. We want you to be comfortable. So anybody who'd feel comfortable putting on the shorts, who'd like to put them on for the interview, changing rooms are in the back." And, you know, 4 or 5 guys would throw on the shorts and they'd laugh and they'd go do it. But the rest of them would just sit there stone-faced thinking, "There is no way I am putting stupid shorts on with my white shirt, black tie, all that." And Southwest would thank those 15 or 16 people for their time and they would send them home. Why? Because the number one attitude that Southwest Airlines was testing for was a sense of humor. Those shorts weren't a gimmick, they were a test. And it worked because they knew exactly what they were looking for. And that's what hiring for attitude really is. Now, we're not changing clothes, but we are assessing a candidate's attitude. We've come a long way since the brown shorts thing. But here's why this attitude piece still matters absolutely so much. We ran a study— 5,000 hiring managers, more than 20,000 hires tracked over 3 years. 46% of those new hires failed within 18 months. But that's not the interesting number. The interesting number is why they failed. Only 11% of those failed hires failed for lack of skills. 9% of them failed for attitude reasons like coachability and emotional intelligence and temperament and motivation. And it makes sense the moment you think about it, right? Skills are easy to test. I'm not a Java programmer, but I can hand you a Java test and I can grade it. I can watch you auscultate the lungs or work a fetal monitor. Skills are black and white. Attitude is the hard part, and attitude is what's actually sinking your hires. So why don't companies fix it? 3 big reasons, and these are the 3 things that we have spent years cracking. Number 1: most interviewers give away the answer without realizing it. Watch how easily it happens. A perfectly good question, "Tell me about a time you faced a difficult situation," in the hands of the typical interviewer becomes, "Tell me about a time you faced a difficult situation and how you overcame it." "Tell me about competing priorities and how you balance them successfully." The second you add those little words to the end of interview questions, you've handed candidates the correct answer to your interview question. You've basically told them, don't share any of your failures, only tell me stories and examples where you come out on top. Think of it this way. There are two kinds of people: problem bringers and problem solvers. Ask a problem solver about a problem, and without any prompting at all, they will tell you how they solved it. That's just who they are. Ask a problem bringer, however, and they will tell you about the problem and stop stop talking. The only way to tell these two kinds of people apart is to ask them about the problem and then stop talking. Because the moment you rescue the candidate, you've blinded yourself to who they really are. The second thing, even with a clean question, most people still can't tell a good answer from a bad one. And this is really where it stops being an art and really becomes a science. We took over 20,000 real interview answers, ran a linguistic analysis on them, and the results were pretty staggering. Low performers use 400% more second-person pronouns. So instead of "I called the customer," a low performer is a lot more likely to say, "Well, what you should do is you should call the customer." They stop telling you what they did and start lecturing you in the abstract, giving you a hypothetical response. Low performers also lean on present and future tense verbs instead of past tense verbs because they're describing what one should do, what one what they ought to do rather than what they actually did. And they use twice as many absolutes—words like always, never, everyone, impossible. Once you start to identify these things, you really can't unhear it. Attitude leaves a fingerprint right there in their answers, and you can train your people to catch it in real time. That brings me to the third thing, and I want to show you, not tell you. Here's a real answer to the question, tell me about a time you were asked to do something you didn't know how to do. "Oh, that's easy. I was always learning on the fly at my last job. Customers were always complaining about our billing system, and honestly, they were right. I got stuck with way more tough problems than anyone else because my boss knew that I was good at problem solving. Reaching out to a manager is one place you can start. In situations like this, I will take it upon myself to dig into the records. There's usually an answer there if you look hard enough. I just don't believe in failure." Rate that answer 1 to 7. Most people, when we test them, give this answer a 5 or 6 or even a 7. Two-thirds of interviewers like that answer. But now look again with what you just learned. Always learning, customers always complaining, more problems than anyone else, absolute stacked on absolutes. Reaching out to a manager is one place you can start, or in situations like this you should blah blah blah. That's not an answer, that's a hypothetical. They never actually tell you a single specific thing they did. And "I don't believe in failure." That's not confidence. That's a person who can't name a real mistake. That's a bad answer. And yet two-thirds of interviewers would have hired that person. That's really the gap. Not because your people aren't smart, but because nobody's ever taught them the questions and nobody ever gave them the answer key to be able to evaluate candidates' responses. And that's what we do. We help you figure out the specific attitudes that actually separate your best people from your worst. And they're usually not what you'd guess, and they're typically not what's written on the boardroom wall. We build you interview questions that reveal those attitudes instead of giving them away, and we give you the answer key so any and every manager on your team can hear the difference between a real answer and a rehearsed one instantly. Listen, if you've ever hired somebody who looked flawless on paper and turned out to be the wrong person entirely, you already know what bad hires cost you, right? But it doesn't have to keep happening. So let's talk. Reach out to us. Tell us what your hiring looks like right now, and we'll show you exactly where it's leaking and how to fix it.
