The CEO Final Interview
Spend your most valuable resource — time — to show people they matter.
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~ongoing to results
- Steps
- 3
- Confidence
- 85%
Hormozi argues that any company up to around 1,000 employees should end its hiring process with a CEO interview. If you truly believe your people are the most important part of the business, the CEO showing up with their most valuable resource — time — proves it more powerfully than money can. In that interview she focuses on the person, not the job: what are their personal goals and do they align with the opportunity in the business. The interview sets the tone for a person-first, human-first relationship rather than treating the hire as a number.
Origin
Hormozi learned this the hard way in her first year of business when her company scaled to 60 employees, lower-level staff began hiring badly, talent quality collapsed, and she had to let many people go — a mistake she vowed never to repeat.
Core principles
- 01In a company under ~1,000 employees, the CEO should conduct the final interview.
- 02Time, not money, is the most valuable signal of how much you value people.
- 03The final interview aligns the candidate's personal goals with the opportunity.
- 04It sets the tone for a person-first relationship from day one.
How to run it
- 1
Reserve the final interview for the CEO
As long as the company is under roughly 1,000 employees, make the CEO the last interview in every hiring process.
Watch out Delegating all interviews too early lets weak hires bring in more weak hires and degrade talent quality.
- 2
Focus on the person, not the role
Ask about the candidate's personal goals and whether they align with the opportunity in the business.
- 3
Set the person-first tone
Use your presence and time to signal that the person matters as a human, not just as a number, establishing the tone of the ongoing relationship.
Pro tip Time is more meaningful than money — showing up personally is the strongest signal you can send.
In the wild
Early in her career Hormozi let her business scale to 60 employees with lower-level employees hiring other employees, which produced really bad talent and forced her to let a lot of her team go.
→ The painful correction taught her to never remove the CEO from the final interview.
Common mistakes
Delegating final interviews too early
Even at 20 employees, handing off all interviewing lets talent quality degrade because weak hires make more weak hires.
Is it for you?
Best for
Founders of companies up to roughly 1,000 employees who claim to be people-first.
Not ideal for
Large enterprises where CEO involvement in every hire is impractical.
From the transcript
“if you are truly a people first company... then you would think that the CEO would show with the most valuable resource they have, which…”
“it started to have lower level employees hiring my employees, and then it was like a mess. Really bad talent”
From the episode
Leila Hormozi: $100,000,000 Leadership, How to Build High-Performance Teams People Never Want to Leave
Leila Hormozi