The Chemistry Call Is a Bad Interview

Here is how a coach gets hired. A sponsor shortlists three of them. The client takes thirty minutes with each, usually on video, usually between other meetings. Afterwards someone asks who they clicked with. That answer decides six months of work and, frequently, a five-figure fee.

The industry calls this the chemistry call, and treats it as the responsible thing to do — a check that the human relationship will hold before anyone commits. It is not irresponsible. It is just a test that almost everyone passes, which is another way of saying it is a test that decides almost nothing.

Everyone passes

Being interesting to a stranger for half an hour is a real skill. It is also the skill every coach who has survived more than two years in this market has already been selected for, repeatedly, by exactly this mechanism. A coach who is bad at the chemistry call does not have a practice to evaluate.

So the shortlist arrives pre-filtered. Three people who are all good at the thing being measured, being measured on it again. Whatever separates them, this conversation is not built to find it.

What it actually measures

Not competence — similarity.

Thirty unstructured minutes with no task in them reward fluency, warmth, confident framing, and a shared frame of reference. Those correlate with being comfortable to talk to. They do not correlate with being useful when a client is defensive, or wrong, or protecting something they have not admitted to protecting.

Worse, the format quietly flatters the buyer. A good chemistry call leaves a client feeling perceptive and well understood, and it is very easy to attribute that feeling to the coach's judgement rather than to their manner. The client leaves with a strong impression that is mostly about themselves.

Ask for the work instead

Replace the conversation with a sample of the job. Bring one live, unresolved problem — not a case study, not something already decided — and ask for twenty minutes of actual coaching on it.

Then watch three things.

**What they do with the problem.** A weak coach reflects it back accurately. A strong one returns it to you in a shape you had not considered, and the shape survives the rest of the week. Accurate listening is table stakes. Reframing is the product.

**What happens when you push back.** Disagree with something they say — even mildly, even if they are right. Some coaches fold instantly, which tells you they will fold in month four when it matters. Some dig in to protect their authority. The one you want does neither: they get curious about the disagreement and keep going.

**Whether they contract or perform.** Ask what they would need from your organisation for this to work, and who else would have to be involved. A coach who has done serious work has a real answer, usually an inconvenient one. A coach who says "just you and me" is describing a nicer engagement than the one you are buying.

The objection worth taking seriously

Trust is not decoration. Nobody says the true thing to a person they have not decided to trust, and thirty minutes of low-stakes conversation is a reasonable way to find out whether trust is available. On that, the defenders of the chemistry call are right.

The problem is not that it tests for trust. It is that trust is necessary and not sufficient, and the ritual is staged as though it had tested for both. The buyer walks away believing they have assessed a coach. They have assessed whether a coach is pleasant, which they would have found out in week one anyway, at no cost.

There is a second objection: a working session under evaluation is artificial too. It is. But it is artificial in the same direction as the job — someone brings a problem, someone works on it, both are slightly self-conscious. That is a description of most coaching sessions. Thirty minutes of mutual charm is artificial in a direction the work never goes.

What this costs the field

Selection pressure does not stay at the individual level. Run a market for fifteen years where the deciding round rewards likeability, and you get a population of coaches selected for likeability — and a buyer class who believe, reasonably, that this is what they were choosing between.

Then the field complains that it is not taken seriously by procurement, that it cannot demonstrate value, that it is compared unfavourably with consulting on outcomes. Some of that is unfair. Some of it is the direct result of a qualifying round that tests nothing procurement would recognise as evidence.

You are not buying someone you enjoy talking to. You are buying someone who will still be useful on the day you turn out to be wrong about something that matters. Those are different people more often than the chemistry call can detect.