When I first started interviewing a lot of job candidates, I had a tendency to come out of an interview fixated on one small thing that the candidate had said or done that made me think twice about hiring them.
I now recognize it as a form of zero-risk bias—a preference for the total elimination of specific risks, even when alternative choices offer a greater overall reduction in risk.1 Somehow, something that happened during the interview would catch my attention, and—like a bull fixated on a matador’s red cape—I would latch onto that potential risk to the exclusion of everything else.
With the benefit of hindsight, I realize now that this is unsurprising since I was new to interviewing and was afraid of recommending someone who might turn out to be a poor fit for the role. Consequently, I had a tendency with these early interviews to make any potential risk a bigger deal than it actually was. When left unchecked, this bias pushed me to recommend a “do not hire” outcome for someone who could otherwise have done well in the role—an unfortunate outcome for me, my team, and the candidate.
If knowing that this bias exists is half the key to overcoming it, what’s the other half? In my case, it’s a combination of two things:
1. I take detailed notes and compare my end-of-interview sentiment against my final recommendation.
I play a little mental game with myself—I write down my hiring recommendation immediately after the interview before reviewing my interview notes. I do this so I can see if reading my detailed notes changed my sentiment.
Taking this tack also helps me hedge against the peak-end rule, defined as “a cognitive bias that impacts how people remember past events. Intense positive or negative moments (the “peaks”) and the final moments of an experience (the “end”) are heavily weighted in our mental calculus.“2 Thus, the way an interview ended can have a disproportionate impact on how we view the entire interview itself.
So how consistent was I?
- More often than not, I’m surprised by the smart ideas and thoughtful insights the candidates shared that I’d managed to note down but had somehow forgotten until I read them in my notes.
- There are also times (though not as common) when the interview ends with me and the candidate feeling quite upbeat, only for me to review my notes and see that I’d identified several areas of concern.
It’s no surprise that after a careful review of my notes, my final recommendations were often different from my fresh-from-the-interview sentiment.
2. I changed the mental framing of my interview summaries.
I used to write my interview summary by trying to answer the question: “Is this candidate qualified for this role?”
This question has the unfortunate effect of framing the hiring decision as a binary yes/no assessment of qualifications, and most hiring decisions require more nuance than that.
I have since found it a lot more useful to instead ask: “What do we, as a company or team, need to have in place for this candidate to succeed in this role? And can we provide that?“
With this alternative framing, getting to the right hiring decision no longer hinges solely on the interviewer accurately assessing a candidate’s skills.
Instead, I’m also prompted to assess how much mentoring and support the candidate would need to succeed, how well their roles and responsibilities are defined, how well they complement the rest of the team, and whether our team’s onboarding processes are mature enough to set up this particular new hire for success.
Conversations with other people on the hiring panel—especially with the hiring manager—also become much more productive because I’m no longer trying to justify or defend my “hire/do not hire” recommendation.
Instead, the conversation becomes a joint, forward-looking conversation about what we’d each have to do to support the new hire if a particular candidate were selected. This framing also has the added benefit of being more aligned with the mindset I later adopted to interview candidates.
Footnotes
- Daniel Crosby, The Laws of Wealth: Psychology and the Secret to Investing Success (Harriman House Limited, 2016), ISBN 9780857195258. ↩︎
- Kane, Lexie. “The Peak–End Rule: How Impressions Become Memories.” Nielsen Norman Group, 30 December 2018, https://www.nngroup.com/articles/peak-end-rule/. ↩︎
