The Executive Interview Format That Reduces Mis-hire Risk with Cristina Navarro, Tubi

Hiring senior leaders on gut feel is a risk most companies cannot afford.

Cristina Navarro, Senior Director of Global Talent Acquisition at Tubi, joins Shannon to discuss why traditional interview formats fail at the executive level and how her team built a structured leadership assessment to close that gap. She explains how the process was co-created with senior leadership, why prompt design matters, and how thorough prep on both sides of the table leads to better decisions.

Cristina also walks through how debrief structure protects against groupthink, how candidate feedback from the process informs onboarding strategy, and why the goal was never to add friction but to give everyone involved more confidence in one of the most consequential hiring decisions a company can make.

Key takeaways:

1. Co-creation drives adoption: When senior leaders help build the assessment, buy-in follows naturally once results come in.
2. Prompt design is the foundation: A role-specific, well-scoped prompt is what separates a meaningful assessment from a generic exercise.
3. Debrief order changes outcomes: Hearing from the most senior voices last protects the room from influence bias before a final decision is made.
4. Recruiting data shapes onboarding: Themes that surface during the assessment can directly inform how a new executive is set up from day one.

Timestamps: 

(00:43) Meet Cristina Navarro

(02:08) Why executive hiring carries more risk than any other level

(03:49) What Tubi does differently in senior leader hiring

(05:20) How the leadership assessment was built and who was involved

(07:14) Preparing both candidates and interviewers for the assessment

(10:25) Why no new faces in the room is an intentional design choice

(11:42) How debriefs are structured to reach a confident hiring decision

(12:55) What candidates say after going through the process

(15:37) Plans to expand the assessment beyond VP-level roles

(17:07) Using recruiting findings to inform executive onboarding

(19:25) Where to connect with Cristina

Transcript

Cristina Navarro (00:00):

The calibration doc that we put together is a really good anchor because that captures all of the themes that we were able to collect throughout the interview process. Our goal by the end of that conversation is to make a hiring decision so that immediately after we can work on hopefully an offer to secure the candidate.

Shannon Ogborn (00:21):

Welcome to Offer Accepted, the podcast that elevates your recruiting game. I'm your host, Shannon Ogborn. Join us for conversations with talent leaders, executives and more to uncover the secrets to building and leading successful talent acquisition teams, gain valuable insights and actionable advice from analyzing cutting edge metrics to confidently claiming your seat at the table. Let's get started.

(00:47):

Hello and welcome to another episode of Offer Accepted. I'm Shannon Ogborn, your host, and this episode is brought to you by Ashby, the all-in-one recruiting platform, empowering ambitious teams from seed to IPO and beyond. I am here today in Atlanta with Cristina Navarro. She is the senior director of global talent acquisition at Tubi, where she oversees all aspects of talent acquisition from early career programs to executive search, which is some of what we're going to be talking about today. She has over 15 years of experience building strategic TA capabilities across technology, media, and enterprise environments, and she brings this really deeply intentional approach to how organizations evaluate and select senior leaders.

(01:24):

Today, she is going to be sharing about how her team has designed a strategic leadership assessment that gives both candidates and hiring managers more confidence in one of the most consequential decisions a company can make, which is hiring leaders. So Cristina, thank you so much for joining us.

Cristina Navarro (01:41):

Thank you for having me.

Shannon Ogborn (01:42):

We're going to be talking today about hiring senior leaders. It seems to be more important than ever just considering how lean teams are and less people being hired and those first hires or senior hires are prety crucial. Tell me a little bit about why in your mind executive hiring demands more rigor than your average hire.

Cristina Navarro (02:08):

Yeah. So the mishire risk or the consequences of mishire risk at the executive level are greater than any other level of hiring within an organization. Beyond that, executive leaders tend to interview quite well in your traditional Q&A style format. So we need to create an approach that keeps that in mind. Beyond that, when you take a look at the executive talent pool, they are highly sought after. They're either happy and thriving where they are, or they're navigating multiple searches at once. So when we take all of that and put it all together, you have to be mindful of speed, candidate experience, how you attract these folks and how you carefully curate a process that gives you high fidelity signal for these types of leaders.

Shannon Ogborn (03:05):

You make a very interesting point about leadership folks being more in tun to ... I wouldn't say they're intentionally trying to trick a Q&A type interview, but they've been at this for a while. They've been a professional for a while and they've also been in rooms with other leaders for a while. So it feels like one of those things that could easily be ended in a mishire, but I know that Tubi has started to take a little bit of a different approach. Tell me a little bit about the what. What are you all doing that you feel like is different and unique from what you have done at previous companies?

Cristina Navarro (03:49):

Yeah. So we always follow a structured hiring process, but for our senior leaders, we want to get a better sense of how they think on their feet, how they respond to feedback, how they respond to pushback. That's very much the way that we work at Tubi. We want to get a better sense of someone's working style. So we developed an assessment where we provide a candidate with a prompt that's very specific to the role to validate what we asked and evaluated throughout the structured hiring process.

Shannon Ogborn (04:23):

I love this because I feel like not only is it unique for the company and it helps you stand out, you were mentioning earlier that executives, they're not just looking at one role. They're hot on the market. They're looking at multiple things. They're working with recruiting agencies that are helping them find opportunities and it is another potential way for Tubi to stand out compared to the others.

Cristina Navarro (04:49):

Yeah, for sure. And I think one of the things that makes this approach a little bit different is that we're not asking for a case study or a presentation. It's very much narrative style format and active discussion.

Shannon Ogborn (05:04):

Yeah. Getting a little bit deeper into the how it was built and implemented. I'm curious to start from the top when you were thinking, what do we need out of this? How did you come to this as a solution?

Cristina Navarro (05:20):

Yeah. So at the top of the conversation, we were talking a little bit about how the consequences are real with a mishire and while we hadn't experienced it, we wanted to get ahead of it, especially as we were continuing to scale and hire. So we wanted to build something that was really, really designed with that in mind. It didn't really require a lot of buy-in because we were building this with members of the senior leadership team, so it was something that was co-created. A lot of the buy-in really came when we started working with the leaders that were actually implementing the assessment, but once folks started going through the process, they started to see the value and they felt a lot more confident in their hiring decisions overall.

Shannon Ogborn (06:07):

Yeah. And that's really the name of the game. Change is always going to be hard and there may be resistance at some point, but once people are able to see the results and I imagine hiring managers in the end or hiring teams are like, you know what, this is actually better for us too. We really get to get a good picture of what it would be like to work with this person on a daily basis, which I think is important at the executive level. When you're an individual contributor, you can put your head down and do your work and collaboration is super important, especially depending on the environment, but it's lower stakes for that piece. When you're an executive, there's no avoiding contact with other people. You have to. It's your job.

Cristina Navarro (06:48):

Yeah. Serious downstream impact, wherever that may take you.

Shannon Ogborn (06:53):

Exactly, exactly. I would love to hear more about how this plays out in practice. If somebody is going into this interview, what are you all doing to prepare on your end to put someone into this interview and then how are you preparing the candidate as well?

Cristina Navarro (07:14):

Yeah. This is one of my favorite parts of the process because I want to make sure that our interviewers are very well calibrated and that the candidates are set up to succeed. So it starts with building out the prompt. It's really important that the recruiter has really strong business context, role context, that they understand the different team members that are going to be evaluating this person and we partner with the hiring leader to develop the prompt. We give that prompt to a few folks that might be involved in the assessment just so that we make sure that we're capturing all of the right lenses there. From there, we use that prompt to create all of our candidate and interviewer prep materials. We have a candidate doc where we outline the prompt, the sequencing, our values, what we're evaluating, the whole run of show. We also make ourselves available to the candidate just to answer any questions that they might have.

(08:10):

And then for the panelists, we create a similar document. The only difference there is that we outline any themes that may have emerged from the interviews and then we also just remind the team of their role in the overall evaluation process.

Shannon Ogborn (08:25):

Both sides of the prep are extremely important. Obviously you want the hiring folks to be set up for success and know exactly what is going into it. I feel similarly when people talk about recruiters going through an interview process, just because someone is an expert in something doesn't mean they don't need the help to set them up for success. They haven't ever worked at your company and having that context I think is really impactful for the candidate to do their best because that also helps the candidate know this isn't a gotcha. We're not trying to trap you. This isn't how many golf balls fit in a 747 plane. It's like a legit real prompt that is related to the job.

Cristina Navarro (09:08):

Yeah, for sure. And I think because it's non-traditional, I think candidates are more used to relying on a deck or a case study and I haven't had anyone not take me up on an offer to prepare in advance.

Shannon Ogborn (09:23):

Yeah. It is unique in that candidates, especially at that level and honestly a lot of levels today, especially anything that's innately more person facing, including executives, it's like, "Okay, we're going to have you spend 10 hours building this deck. What is your 30, 60, 90 plan for this organization?" And I'm not saying that those things are inherently bad, but it just really depends on the way your company operates and the fact that you all are taking the way your company operates, which is everyone is in a room together discussing. I think that's really meaningful for the candidates to see the culture of the company. I know when we had chatted initially and you were telling me about this, I was thinking to myself, wow, that would be potentially intimidating for a candidate. You're walking into a room full of your peers and other executives and leadership, but I loved how you were telling me about how with the exception of maybe the CEO, everyone in the room is someone that they've actually met before one-on-one.

Cristina Navarro (10:25):

Yeah. So there's no new faces. That's intentional because what we want to do is we want to validate what was evaluated throughout the process and we don't want someone net new without having any candidate context being part of the debrief conversation where we're ultimately making a hiring decision. So that piece is super important.

Shannon Ogborn (10:45):

And just more comfortable for the candidate. Again, because I think when, especially when you're doing anything in a group of people, it just feels like a trap. It's not, you can set it up with the best of intentions, but that's how people perceive interviews. And I think it's important to think about like, yes, not all perceptions are reality of intent, but that's how people feel. And so it's like, what can we do to make sure that the candidates really feeling like we have their best interest and we want to hire them and if you get to this stage, we're trying to validate if that's the right decision. And then lastly on, I guess more of the logistics and how of this, tell me some about how the debriefs go and how they play out, because I know you put a lot of time into making sure that everyone's set up for success in the debriefs and that you're able to get to a decision that you've made thoughtfully and rigorously.

Cristina Navarro (11:42):

Yeah. So I think the calibration doc that we put together is a really good anchor because that captures all of the themes that we were able to collect throughout the interview process. So we use that as a baseline. We go around the room, the last folks to provide their feedback, whatever that might be, are usually the hiring manager and the most senior leader in the organization, just so that doesn't influence any of the feedback. And then our goal by the end of that conversation is to make a hiring decision so that immediately after we can work on hopefully an offer to secure the candidate.

Shannon Ogborn (12:20):

That's amazing. I would imagine, I guess in terms of results that people feel fairly confident accepting offers if they get them, just because they've seen sort of this realistic job preview, they've met all the stakeholders they need to. I mean, there's nothing more disappointing as any candidate, but I'm sure, especially as a senior leader, that you just don't feel like you can make a decision because you haven't met the people that you're actually going to be working with. Has this process had any impact on how candidates are perceiving offers or the experience?

Cristina Navarro (12:55):

Yeah. So I think it serves multiple purposes, right? Because for the interviewer, if there were any open questions, that's your opportunity to address that. And then it's also an opportunity for the candidate to addresss those as well, because there's an opportunity for Q&A there. I will say most, if not all of the candidates that have gone through the exercise feel like they have a better sense of what it's like to actually work in the company having gone through that exercise because it just feels a lot different when you're interviewing. It's just not the same format. So that's been a really positive indicator following some of these sessions for sure.

Shannon Ogborn (13:39):

Remind me how long you all have been doing this process.

Cristina Navarro (13:42):

I want to say it's been like just over a year.

Shannon Ogborn (13:47):

Okay. So it's like new-ish. I feel like the thing that's hard with results and anything related to senior leadership or executives is it just takes a while to understand sort of like what. Yeah, like what the results are. Executives typically stay longer anyways, there's more runway to ramp up because it's such a big job. Have you directionally seen any of those positive outcomes despite it's only a year of data, but anything else that comes to mind for you?

Cristina Navarro (14:21):

It still feels early, but I would say that if there are any themes that emerge throughout the entire process, we could also use that to inform the onboarding strategy. So that's something that's helpful. It's still early, so it's hard to say that like our retention is at 100% it is, but it might not necessarily be because of the assessment. So it's still early days, but it's one of those things that we continuously improve after every single one of these assessments we get feedback from the candidate, from the hiring manager, from the panelists, from the recruiter, and then we improve the next one to follow.

Shannon Ogborn (15:01):

Yeah, that's what recruiting and hiring is all about. It's continuous improvement. It's not a set it and a forget it thing. And you mentioned it earlier, executive retention in the process you had before wasn't necessarily broken, but that doesn't mean there isn't an opportunity to make it even better. So in the spirit of continuous improvement, what is next for you all in terms of where this is implemented, where it goes? Is it going to different role types or levels? How does that look for you all moving forward?

Cristina Navarro (15:37):

So we're enjoying it. It is still new, but we're thinking about what this will look like beyond VP+. So what does this look like at the director or senior director level? We need to think about format and demand because how we engage folks at the senior director level and the conversations that might happen at VP+ might be a little bit different, but how we work is generally the same. So that's kind of what's next for us is just thinking about how we're going to reimagine the exercise for that specific level of leadership.

Shannon Ogborn (16:15):

Yeah. I think there's this philosophy that I cannot remember who coined it or said it first, but there's this philosophy of do things that don't scale because that is what can get you the best result, but at the same time you're like, "Okay, but if we're going to move this to other orgs or other levels, it needs to scale in some way because you guys put so much prep into these types of interviews very reasonably, right? Because as we talked about before, the mishire is such a bigger risk, but yeah, I'm very curious to see how you all scale it at different levels and it's like what are the necessary steps at VP level versus senior director versus manager and so on.

Cristina Navarro (17:07):

Yeah. I think it always comes back to like what is it that you're optimizing for at that level and then how do you build something around

Shannon Ogborn (17:15):

That? One thing that you mentioned earlier though that I think is really interesting is when you were saying something about pulling the onboarding in, pulling this information into onboarding, my hot take of the episode, I feel like this shouldn't be a hot take. I try to insert one in every episode, though no one asked for it. People really don't understand back to the prep stuff also that just because you're a senior leader doesn't mean you don't need onboarding. You've worked at tons of companies, but you've never worked at this company or unlikely unless you're a boomerang. But I think people really, especially in smaller startup environments, I've noticed they're like, " This person's just going to come in and hit the ground running. "It's like, well, they come in and hit the ground running because they have the information to be successful in hitting the ground running, even just a little, but ideally a lot more context of the business because this is a completely new situation for them.

Cristina Navarro (18:15):

Yeah, no, 100%. We have a pretty comprehensive onboarding strategy that's like a whole other show, but they all kind of intersect at one point or another. So it's important that you use the recruiting findings to inform what onboarding looks like.

Shannon Ogborn (18:34):

Yes. We just had an episode we recorded at our Ashby conference on the feedback loop between talent and people operations and it's so important to get that right. And I think now that data's becoming a bit more easy to surface and trends are coming up, it's easy to inform that both on an individual level for the hiring manager specifically for that person, but also on a scaled level for higher volume roles like sales or customer success, things that you can see more trends over time of, okay, this is actually really unique to our org. People aren't coming in with this. We should assess it, but we should also help people get into it once they're on board if it's a more unique situation. So yes, that relationship is very important.

Cristina Navarro (19:23):

It's so important.

Shannon Ogborn (19:24):

I agree. Amazing. Well, for those who are newer listeners, we have moved these final three questions to our extended version on YouTube. So if you want to hear what hiring excellence means to Cristina, her recruiting hot take and what she would tell her earlier career self, please head there. We are coming up on our time. Where should people go to learn more about you and your work?

Cristina Navarro (19:46):

You can find me on LinkedIn, Cristina Navarro at Tubi.

Shannon Ogborn (19:51):

Amazing. Well, executive hiring is so important. I think a lot of people are going to get a good understanding from this on ways that they can challenge the status quo in their own companies with executive hiring. So I really appreciate you joining us.

Cristina Navarro (20:05):

Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate you.

Shannon Ogborn (20:09):

This episode was brought to you by Ashby. What an ATS should be: A scalable all-in-one tool that combines powerful analytics with your ATS scheduling, sourcing, and CRM. To never miss an episode, subscribe to our newsletter at www.ashbyhq.com/podcast. Thank you for listening and we'll see you next time.