After 20+ years as both an external headhunter and internal recruiting executive, it’s time someone said what we all know but won’t admit

“We hire the most qualified candidate.”

This is the lie I’ve heard in boardrooms, on interview panels, and in post-hire justifications throughout my career. The fiction that our evaluation process is about credentials instead of chemistry.

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Here’s the truth nobody wants to say out loud:

Hiring managers often decide within the first 10 minutes. Everything after that becomes theater designed to justify a decision they’ve already made. Too many in the recruiting industry know this but stay quiet. We pretend the “structured process” creates pure objectivity when it often just adds professional polish to gut reactions.

Decades of behavioral science back this up: confirmation bias, the halo effect, and snap judgments drive more hiring decisions than anyone wants to admit.

I don’t have a magic solution. But I know what I’ve witnessed in thousands of post-interview conversations, and it’s not what we tell candidates to prepare for.

The Performance Everyone Pretends Is Real

Two years ago, I was managing the search for a senior level R&D role. Three final candidates. All had stellar backgrounds. Published researchers. Multiple successful drug launches.

After the interviews, the hiring manager said, “David has the strongest technical background, but something about Sarah just clicked.”

Three hours of “structured interviews.” Competency scorecards. Reference checks. All theater.

They decided on Sarah in minute 7 when she made a joke about regulatory timelines and everyone laughed. David’s 15 years of oncology experience? Irrelevant once they didn’t connect with him personally.

By the next day, the decision had been packaged into professional-sounding justifications: “Sarah demonstrated superior stakeholder management skills and cultural alignment.”

Translation: They liked her better.

I’ve watched this pattern repeat throughout my career in executive search. The system is designed to package gut reactions as analytical decisions.

What Hiring Managers Actually Discuss

After candidates leave the room, hiring managers don’t discuss technical qualifications. They discuss how people made them feel.

Real post-interview conversations I’ve witnessed:

• “I could see myself having coffee with her”
• “He reminded me of my best hire from five years ago”
• “Something felt off, but I can’t put my finger on it”
• “She’s obviously brilliant, but would she fit our culture?”

Notice what’s missing? Technical competence. Process improvements. Measurable achievements.

These gut reactions get translated into professional-sounding evaluation criteria: “Candidate demonstrated strong executive presence and strategic thinking.”

The system convinces everyone this makes the process more objective. It doesn’t. It just makes the subjectivity sound more sophisticated.

The Reverse Engineering Problem

Here’s what actually happens – and behavioral science confirms it:

Minute 1-10: Gut reaction forms based on presence, energy, likability (the “halo effect” in action)
Minutes 11-60: Hiring managers ask questions designed to confirm their initial impression (classic confirmation bias)
Post-interview: The team reverse-engineers justifications for the person they already decided they liked

This isn’t unique to hiring. Decades of research on decision-making shows that humans regularly make snap judgments and then retroactively justify them with logical-sounding reasons. Hiring just happens to be a high-stakes arena where we really don’t want to admit this is happening.

“Sarah really understood our regulatory challenges,” becomes the official reason. The real reason? She made them laugh and feel comfortable.

Throughout my career, I watched technically superior candidates lose opportunities because they couldn’t connect personally. I’ve seen objectively weaker candidates get offers because they nailed the human connection.

The qualifications get you in the room. The chemistry gets you the job.

But we keep selling people preparation for the wrong 50 minutes of the interview.

How the Industry Stays Complicit

Let me be clear: Structured hiring processes have value. They can reduce bias, create consistency, and make evaluations more fair and defensible. I’m not arguing against structure.

What I am saying is this: The recruiting industry has built an entire coaching system around the fiction that structure makes interviews purely objective.

Candidates get trained to craft perfect STAR method responses. They’re drilled on technical questions. They memorize achievement stories.

Meanwhile, research shows that first impressions form in seconds and heavily influence all subsequent evaluation – regardless of how structured the process is.

I’ve watched this disconnect play out too many times: candidates preparing for behavioral interviews and competency frameworks while the real decision happened when someone made the hiring manager feel confident, comfortable, and excited to work with them.

Structure doesn’t eliminate human chemistry. It just professionalizes how we justify it.

The recruiting industry perpetuates the myth of pure objectivity because it’s easier to package “interview skills training” than to admit that executive hiring is fundamentally about human connection evaluated through professional structure.

Why This Lie Hurts Everyone

Candidates suffer because we’re training them for the wrong game. They’re polishing resumes and memorizing frameworks while missing the real evaluation criteria.

Hiring managers suffer because they can’t admit they’re making emotional decisions. They have to pretend there’s science behind what’s mostly instinct.

Companies suffer because the “best qualified” person might not be the best leader, teammate, or cultural fit. But we can’t acknowledge that because it sounds too subjective.

Recruiters suffer because too many of us maintain elaborate fictions instead of helping people understand what’s really being evaluated.

Everyone knows the emperor has no clothes. But too much of the system depends on pretending the evaluation process is purely about credentials instead of credentials plus connection.

What I Learned From Both Sides

In my years witnessing both external searches and internal hiring processes, the candidates who won weren’t necessarily the most accomplished on paper. They were the ones who understood that interviews are fundamentally about human connection wrapped in professional evaluation theater.

The best candidates I worked with had figured out that their job wasn’t to prove they were the most qualified. Their job was to help hiring managers feel confident about choosing them.

Subtle but game-changing difference.

They focused on:
• Making genuine personal connection in the first few minutes
• Sharing stories that revealed character, not just competence
• Asking questions that showed they understood the human dynamics of the role
• Creating moments where everyone in the room felt heard and valued

They didn’t focus on:
• Having the perfect answer to every behavioral question
• Demonstrating superior technical knowledge
• Proving they were more qualified than other candidates
• Following rigid interview frameworks

Too often, the recruiting industry packages their success as “superior interview skills” when it’s really superior human connection skills.

The Path Forward

I don’t have a magic solution for fixing hiring bias or making the process more objective. But I know what I saw in thousands of post-interview discussions.

People hire people they like, trust, and want to work with. Technical qualifications are table stakes. Human connection is the tiebreaker. Structured processes help create fairness, but they don’t eliminate the human element – they just make it more professional.

Maybe it’s time we stop pretending otherwise.

Instead of teaching people to be better at fake interviews, maybe we should teach them to be better at genuine human connection within professional contexts.

Instead of claiming our evaluation matrices are purely objective, maybe we should acknowledge that culture fit and leadership presence involve both measurable competencies and human chemistry.

The recruiting industry’s biggest lie isn’t that we hire the most qualified candidate. It’s that we’ve convinced everyone – including ourselves – that structured processes eliminate the human judgment factor when they really just make it more defensible.

I’ve witnessed the gap between what we say and what actually happens. Now I want to help people understand what’s really being evaluated so they can prepare for the actual game, not the one we pretend we’re playing.

Question for you: In your experience, have you ever seen the “most qualified” candidate lose to someone who just “felt right” for the role? What did that teach you about how hiring really works?