Ask HN: How do you validate new hire candidates (especially senior leaders)?

All throughout life, but especially recently, I've seen a ton of people who suck at planning, suck at getting things done, and suck at critical thinking. However, these people are often great at personal relationships, so whatever their track record, they know how to navigate organizational politics and snag amazing referrals. I was disappointed to see this also happen at senior levels, after getting senior management positions myself (before, I'd always given benefit of the doubt, maybe I'm not seeing the whole picture).

The result I see over and over is people building amazing resumes, but leaving a train wreck of a situation at every position where they get hired. But on the resume, each train wreck only looks like an amazing company and an amazing job well done, with some nice referrals about the person's leadership skills. It seems once you get one senior position, everyone automatically believes you're qualified to be a heavy duty leader, and nobody questions whether you need to be sent to the minors again first! Especially if you have an MBA.

So my buddy and I are building something to try to fix this problem, but I'm curious. Do you guys also agree it's a big problem that needs fixing? In especially difficult projects/environments, is it just a situation where anyone would have failed, or is it usually that the person actually is that bad? What are your experiences and what do you do now to make sure these people don't slip through the interview process into your companies and startups?

Me, for example, I once came onto a project as the #2 guy; this project was in the red zone, high visibility, and couldn't be cancelled. I took one look and realized the #1 had done the architecture all wrong so that the requirements could not be fulfilled. I spent 2 months with the team redesigning everything, and I mean everything. Furthermore, the schedule could never be dependable because the #1 could not foresee whether certain activities were dependant on other activities, and so never planned for the details to happen in sequence. The #1 guy of course took all the credit for a successful delivery and went on to make other glorious mistakes for other things. I believe this is a classic story, and one that needs to be fixed. What say you?

As for what I do to prevent such people from coming into my organization/project/etc, I tend to only rely on referrals from people I trust in my innermost circle (which contains only 4 people). Any other referral carries no weight in my mind and should be treated the same as any candidate off the street, no matter what the credentials or recruiters say.