Ask a hiring panel to describe a resilient candidate and you will usually hear the same story: someone who worked eighteen hour days during a crisis, who never complained, who pushed through. It sounds impressive. It is also, quite often, the wrong signal entirely.
Grit and resilience get used interchangeably in interviews, but they are not the same thing. Grit is about enduring. Resilience, the kind that actually holds up in senior roles over years rather than weeks, is about something steadier: positive energy that does not curdle into cynicism, and integrity that does not bend when things get difficult. That is soundness. It is quieter than grit, harder to spot in an interview, and far more predictive of how someone will actually perform when the pressure is real.
Why hiring leaders misread this
Most interviews reward the story of endurance because it is easy to tell and easy to verify. A candidate can describe the project that nearly broke them and how they got through it. That narrative feels like proof of resilience. But it only tells you the person survived. It does not tell you how they treated colleagues under that strain, whether their judgement held, or whether the energy they brought to the team was steady or draining.
Soundness shows up differently, and it is harder to draw out with a standard competency question. You need to probe:
- How someone behaved when a decision they made turned out to be wrong, not just how they recovered from it
- Whether their account of a difficult period includes any acknowledgement of their own part in the difficulty
- How they speak about people who left, were let go, or disagreed with them during that pressure
- Whether the energy in the room, in the interview itself, feels sustainable or performed
None of this comes from a single well rehearsed answer. It comes from a partner in the room, asking a second and third question, and noticing what is not said as much as what is.
The link to burnout and churn in senior roles
Here is where it matters for HR directors. When a hiring process rewards endurance over soundness, you tend to appoint people who look strong under pressure because they simply absorb more of it, often at cost to themselves or to the people around them. That works for a while. Then it does not.
The pattern often looks like this: a senior appointment performs well for the first year, gets described as driven and hardworking, and then the team around them starts to churn. Exit interviews from that period, if they happen at all, tend to surface phrases like inconsistent, unpredictable, or hard to read. Those are soundness problems. They were very likely visible at hiring stage, just not asked about directly.
This is the uncomfortable truth for many HR functions in South Africa right now, dealing with genuine skills shortages and pressure to fill senior roles quickly: the candidates who look most resilient on paper are sometimes the ones whose steadiness will not survive real strain. Grit gets someone through the interview. Soundness gets a team through a difficult year without losing half its people.
Closing the loop
The honest way to test whether your hiring process reads resilience correctly is to look backwards, not forwards. What did the people who left in the last two years actually say, if you asked them properly and gave them room to be candid? Did the patterns in those conversations trace back to something that should have been visible at interview stage?
This is exactly why we run structured exit interviews as part of our work with clients, not as a box ticking formality but as a genuine feedback loop. Done well, an exit interview tells you far more about what your hiring process is actually rewarding than any interview scorecard does. It closes the gap between who you thought you were hiring and who showed up under pressure.
If burnout and churn in senior roles are costing you more than they should, it is worth having a proper conversation about what your hiring process is really testing for, and what your exit data is quietly telling you. Get in touch with The Appointment Firm. We would be glad to talk it through.
