Senior executives are generally good at assessing people. Years of observing performance in high-stakes conditions, interviewing hundreds of candidates, and experiencing the downstream consequences of hiring decisions produce genuine pattern recognition that is a real asset in talent assessment. Most experienced executives trust this capability — and are correct to trust it under normal conditions.

The problem is that the most consequential hiring decisions — C-suite appointments, key leadership team additions, the critical hire that a strategic initiative depends on — are almost never made under normal conditions. They are made under the specific conditions that most reliably degrade the people-judgment the executive is counting on: peak operational pressure, time urgency, and a physiological state shaped by months of high cortisol load.

What Cortisol Does to Social Perception