Netskope CEO Sanjay Beri says he does not just call the references candidates hand over. He also tries to track down the ones they did not list, to figure out the real personality behind the resume.

In an interview with Fortune, Beri, who leads the $4.8 billion software company Netskope, explained that “we do a heck of a lot of background checks and references,” and that “a lot of those references are literally just on cultural fit.” The practical takeaway for job seekers is blunt: before your final interview even happens, the coworker or manager you “conveniently” left off might already be talking to your future boss.

Beri’s method goes beyond polite reference checks about past performance. He said he asks candidates about how they handle interpersonal friction, specifically “tell me your interpersonal style” and “tell me what happens when you have a disagreement or conflict.” Then he asks the same kind of question when speaking with former employers. The aim is to see how someone behaves in the trenches, not just how they present during wins. As Beri described it, building a business is “a jagged line up.” In other words, the culture is stress-tested in real time, and references can reveal how a person responds when things get uncomfortable.

That is why the questions are designed to extract behavior under pressure. Beri told Fortune he presses on “How do they handle conflict? How do they handle when they have to do something that they disagree with? What happens in hard times?” He also wants to understand how candidates relate across typical boundaries inside a company. In Beri’s framing, this is a common source of healthy friction, such as the way marketing and sales may clash in textbook-y ways. He described asking, “what does the marketing person think of the head of sales? There’s often like some textbook healthy conflicts-and I want to know what those people think.” It is not just “are you nice,” but “do you manage disagreement like a teammate or a weapon.”

Beri also set a clear hiring priority: Netskope uses cultural fit as a decisive filter. He said he would pick “a nine on cultural fit and a seven on domain, versus the opposite every day of the week.” The incentive structure behind this is simple. Netskope has scaled fast since launching in 2012, hitting unicorn status in 2018, going public on the Nasdaq last year, and now operating in over 220 countries with more than 3,000 employees. That kind of growth requires lots of hiring, and Beri warned that “one bad apple is all it takes to unravel a culture that took years to build.” If your company is expanding at speed, culture drift stops being a “nice to have” and starts becoming a performance risk.

The scrutiny, importantly, does not stop once someone gets the offer. Beri said Netskope has cultural traits it rates for people already at the company, such as whether they are open, collaborative, and innovative. He told Fortune these traits are “talked about in every all hands,” and then, at the end of the year, everyone is reviewed on them. The top scorers are recognized company-wide and put on the walls, and their ratings affect performance reviews. It is also not only managers who judge: Beri said the review happens through peers and could also include input from people who work for the reviewed staff.

Zoom out and Netskope’s approach fits a broader shift among CEOs: personality, as a measurable input, is creeping deeper into hiring and leadership evaluation. Fortune also reports other examples where leaders test candidates for details that are harder to capture on a CV. Twilio CEO Khozema Shipchandler interviews senior candidates over 45-minute dinners, watching how they carry themselves off the clock while listening for one word in particular, “I,” because it can signal you are not a team player. Bupa CEO Iñaki Ereño holds what Fortune describes as 6 hours of tests and even wants to see candidates order wine with their meal, which he believes indicates initiative. Fortune also notes personality screening tactics such as a CEO who would not hire someone who salts their food before tasting it, and another CEO who quietly asks a server to mess up a candidate’s order mid-meal to see how they react. The story even points back to the “beer test” Steve Jobs reportedly used, taking candidates on informal walk-and-talks and asking himself whether he would have a beer with them and talk to them relaxed.

For boards and executives, the signal here is not “be weird in interviews.” It is that culture is being operationalized, and the operationalization is getting more invasive. If executives believe cultural fit and conflict management predict how teams behave under pressure, then reference checks become a tool to validate “fit” with real-world context. And once a company like Netskope ties hiring decisions and performance reviews to cultural traits, the organization gets a feedback loop: the people who match the desired behaviors stay and are recognized, while mismatch gets surfaced sooner. In high-growth environments, that loop can be the difference between scaling as a system and scaling as a chaos engine.