How to Not "Like" Candidates

One of the biggest dangers in hiring is that you end up swapping out a difficult question (is this the right person for the job?) for a much easier one (do I like this person?). It’s easy to see why that can lead to less-than-desirable hiring outcomes.

What’s more difficult is devising a series of steps to proactively check your biases and ensure that you and your teammates make quality hiring decisions. Here are 10 tips that you can put into place to make this a reality.

1. Use a Target (Results Expected + Competencies) to define what you are looking for. Ensure that you and your teammates are aligned on this.

2. Source from your 2nd-degree networks, and actively seek the diversity you are looking to build into your company. Don’t just rely on hiring your friends, and don’t lower the bar in interviewing just because someone is a referral.

3. Implement structured interviews where you ask a consistent set of initial questions for a given role.

4. Avoid allowing small talk and rapport building to veer into common interest discussions, as this can bias you in favor of candidates where you had more to discuss.

5. Avoid talking about yourself too much, either at the beginning of the interview, or in response to things that candidates tell you. If you do, you create an opportunity for savvy candidates to take you off on a rapport-building tangent that has nothing to do with the role, and you may find them extra likable (and relatable) because of it.

6. Related to some of the above points, you should have a fairly clear sense of your time management when conducting an interview. If you’re aiming to cover 6 initial questions in an interview, make sure you get to all 6 with every candidate you interview.

7. Ensure that you have a consistent mental map for how you are looking to validate and concretize each story that you hear about. One huge danger with candidates that you like is that you will tend to trust their subjective description of a positive (or negative) event in their past. Keep yourself honest by having a clear standard of what counts as a “real story”.

8. Force you and your teammates to assign specific ratings on each aspect of the Target, backed by objective data gathered from the interview. (Be honest where you are light on data). The goal is to minimize basing your decision on gut impressions or a sense of how the candidate “performed” during the interview.

9. When making the decision, discuss as a group each individual category of the Target, one by one. And review the evidence for it (or lack thereof.) This will prevent you from just deciding that you holistically “like” the candidate.

10. Celebrate a culture of continuous improvement in interviewing and hiring. Call each other out where you think things could improve. Everyone should approach this with a growth mindset—hiring decisions are hard, and it’s easy to slip. We need teammates to help catch us when we do.