How Senior Leaders Prepare for High-Stakes Interviews: 2026 Findings
Ray Frohlich, July 2026
I have spent twenty-five years in technology strategy and governance for research libraries and universities, including two decades of hiring staff and serving on search committees for senior roles. I have watched accomplished people walk into processes that changed while they were not looking. What I had never seen written down is how senior people actually prepare. So this summer, I asked.
Fifteen senior professionals responded to an open survey over two weeks in July. That is a small number, and I am treating it that way. What follows is not a study with conclusions. It is a first set of observations, with the counts stated plainly so you can weigh them yourself, shared to start a conversation rather than settle one.
Who responded
Eleven of the fifteen work at the director level or above, including seven at vice president level or higher. They come from eight sectors: financial services, professional services, government, healthcare, nonprofit, technology, manufacturing and consumer, and higher education. Twelve had interviewed within the last two years, and four were actively interviewing when they responded.
The premise, checked
The premise of this research was that the senior interview process has changed more than most people realize. Asked what had changed most since their last search, ten of the thirteen respondents for whom the question applied named a concrete shift: AI or automated screening (four), video or remote rounds (three), multi-stage panel loops (two), and take-home exercises (one). Three said not much had changed.
One respondent, back in the market after more than ten years away, described what the change costs in practice: a genuine learning curve, with several interviews behind them before they could anticipate the questions and have examples ready.
A sample this small cannot settle the premise. But the answers were specific rather than vague, which suggests the change is felt, not merely assumed.
1. The hardest part is not the answers, it is knowing what is being assessed
Asked to name the hardest part of preparing, seven of fifteen chose knowing what interviewers were really assessing. That is nearly half, and the most common answer by a wide margin, ahead of telling stories without rambling (four) and answering behavioral questions well (three).
Those same seven also rated their own readiness lower, averaging about 3.4 on a five-point scale against 4.5 for everyone else, a gap of more than a full point. These are small groups, so hold the comparison loosely. But it points somewhere specific. The anxiety of senior candidates seems less about performance and more about visibility. People felt least prepared when they could not see the criteria.
2. AI arrived on both sides of the table, quickly
All twelve respondents whose most recent search was within the last two years used an AI tool somewhere in their preparation. The three who did not last searched two to five years ago.
Fifteen people cannot establish a trend, but a split this clean is hard to ignore. Larger surveys of general job seekers report AI use somewhere between forty and eighty percent, so a sample this senior and this recent, reached through my own network, should run higher, and it did. The interesting part is not the level but the timing. In this sample, AI went from absent to universal in the space between search cycles. Set beside the screening shift above, it means AI arrived on both sides of the table at once: employers adopted it to screen in the same window candidates adopted it to prepare.
Worth noting is where it showed up for candidates: respondents described AI helping with written materials and research. One, asked what would have made preparing easier, wished for an AI mock interviewer. The gap between AI for materials and AI for practice appears again below.
3. Named structures are rarer than the advice industry suggests
Interview advice leans heavily on frameworks like STAR. In this sample, ten of fifteen use no named answering structure, and two of them had never heard of one. Among the seven respondents at vice president level or above, one uses STAR.
Whether that reflects fluency earned or habit unexamined, this data cannot say. But it complicates the assumption that senior candidates arrive with a method. Several appear to arrive with experience and improvise, and four of the fifteen named rambling as their hardest problem. One top executive, guided by a search firm, described the real preparation shift not as a framework at all but as a change of direction: presenting what they will do, not just reciting what they have done. If someone has measured how often senior candidates actually use these frameworks, I have not found it. Until then, the advice rests on an assumption.
4. Preparation is heavy on research, light on practice
Every respondent researched the organization and their interviewers. Eight wrote out stories or examples. Six rehearsed out loud. Two worked with a coach. Exactly one did a mock interview with another person. Four worked with a recruiter or executive search firm, and the two who described that experience both credited it with making them feel prepared.
Preparation, at least here, concentrates on gathering inputs and thins out where it becomes rehearsal. Large-scale usage data from career platforms points the same direction: AI activity clusters around documents and barely touches practice. The one unprompted wish in the free responses fits the pattern: a practice partner that requires no scheduling and no exposure.
5. Confidentiality shapes behavior, not just nerves
Twelve of the fifteen searched while employed. Six of those called confidentiality a significant concern, and one more reported that it shaped which tools and methods they were willing to use.
That last answer deserves attention. Discretion in a job search is usually discussed as a feeling. For at least some senior candidates, it operates as a filter that decides what help they will accept.
What respondents asked of employers
The free responses carried a second thread, aimed not at candidates but at the people who run searches. Respondents asked for clear timelines and honest expectations. They wanted to know why a role was open. One described the difficulty of bringing new ideas to an organization whose current state they could not see. Another described their best interview as a small, conversational video call with two future colleagues, in contrast to scripted panels that left no room for the questions that mattered most to them.
None of this is expensive, and most of it is a choice about how a search is run. Having helped run searches myself, I read this thread as the part of the survey easiest to act on.
What I make of it
Held loosely, the pattern is this. Senior candidates put their preparation into gathering: research, written materials, and now AI. They are thin on the two things that most shape how an interview actually goes: seeing what is being assessed, and practice. If a larger sample bears this out, that is where preparation advice, and hiring practice, should focus.
About this research
The Candidate Research Survey ran for two weeks in July 2026 as informal practitioner research, distributed through LinkedIn and direct referral. Fifteen people responded. The survey required no sign-in and collected no email alongside the answers; contact details for anyone requesting these findings were gathered on a separate form, kept apart from the survey data by design. No compensation was offered, and nothing published here carries a name.
One thing worth restating from the survey itself: I also build tools in this space, and what I learn from this research informs how I think about that work.
These findings will also inform leadership development work I am helping plan for this fall. Most published research on job searching samples the general market, while the senior level runs mostly on advice rather than data; that gap is the reason for this project, and for the larger round I plan to run.
If this raised something for you, agreement, objection, or a story of your own, I would like to hear it.