According to Fortune, former Coach CEO Lew Frankfort uses an intense “immerse interviewing” process that includes rating emotional intelligence and self-assessing 80 different skills. During his 29-year CEO tenure at Coach, Frankfort scaled the company from $6 million in annual revenue to a $5 billion fashion empire. His three-step interview process begins with traditional background questions, then moves to having candidates rate their former boss’s EQ on a 1-10 scale. The final stage involves ranking themselves on 80 capabilities including style, street smarts, integrity, and financial acumen. About 80% of Fortune 500 companies now use personality assessments for senior hires, with other CEOs like Eventbrite’s Julia Hartz using the Hogan method and Sweet Loren’s CEO deploying CliftonStrengths quizzes.
The Coach CEO’s hiring machine
Frankfort spent 46 years at Coach, with nearly three decades as CEO, so he’s had plenty of time to refine his approach. What’s fascinating is how structured his process became after experiencing hiring regrets. He basically created a system to counter his own biases – he admits he’s still drawn to charismatic candidates, but this framework forces him to look deeper. The whole thing is designed to surface what people can’t or won’t say about themselves directly. Asking candidates to rate their former boss’s EQ? That’s clever because it gives you insight into how they perceive leadership and relationships without putting them on the defensive about their own shortcomings.
That massive skills checklist
Eighty skills is… a lot. We’re talking everything from courage and curiosity to style sense and street smarts. But here’s the thing – Frankfort isn’t just looking at the individual ratings. He’s hunting for patterns. Clusters of high or low scores, outliers that don’t make sense, contradictions that need probing. It’s basically a structured way to have a conversation about capabilities without it feeling like an interrogation. The self-assessment becomes the agenda for the rest of the interview. And let’s be real – when you’re hiring senior talent who will be your direct reports, you absolutely need this level of scrutiny. These are the people who will make or break your company’s trajectory.
The personality test gold rush
It’s not just Frankfort – personality assessments have become huge business. The fact that 80% of Fortune 500 companies use them tells you something about the hunger for better hiring tools. Eventbrite’s CEO uses the Hogan method to predict how her leadership style will mesh with candidates, even using AI to identify potential friction points. Sweet Loren’s CEO uses CliftonStrengths to find people with positive attitudes and teamwork skills. But here’s my question: are we over-indexing on these assessments? There’s a real risk of creating homogeneous teams where everyone tests well but lacks the creative tension that drives innovation. These tests can be valuable tools, but they shouldn’t replace human judgment entirely.
Can this work for everyone?
Frankfort’s approach sounds incredibly thorough, but it’s also massively time-intensive. He personally conducts every interview for his direct reports. That works when you’re a CEO hiring a handful of senior leaders, but what about companies hiring at scale? And there’s another concern – could this process accidentally screen out unconventional talent? People who might be brilliant but don’t interview well or struggle with self-assessment? Frankfort argues his method actually reduces bias, but I wonder if it just replaces one set of biases with another. Still, you can’t argue with his results – taking Coach from $6 million to billions suggests he figured out something about building world-class teams.
