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And that’s the uncomfortable truth – one that no one sees. If you’re a recruiter, you probably know this intuitively, but recruiters don’t call the shots in candidate selection.
So this is for you – engineering, delivery, and ops leaders: your teams are not trained to interview, and that’s why you’re not able to hire.
What are the typical reasons for hiring failure you fall back to?
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There aren’t enough good candidates.
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We can’t find good candidates.
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We’re flooded with resumes but none of them fit.
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Recruiters aren’t doing a good job.
All of these are super convenient, externalise the problem from the teams that are hiring, and all of them are mostly wrong.
The core reason companies can’t hire has very little to do with candidates. It has everything to do with interviewers. Let me explain.
Interviewing Is a Skill. We Pretend It Isn’t.
Most interview panelists are never trained to interview. They are good engineers, product managers, designers, or leaders. So we assume they’ll automatically be good interviewers. One day, a calendar invite appears titled “Interview – 60 mins”, and they’re officially part of the hiring process. No training. No calibration. No feedback loop. They’re essentially thrown into the ocean and expected to swim.
As an industry, we’ve chosen not to look, and then complain that we don’t understand.
Interviewing, however, is a very specific capability:
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Separating fundamentals from familiarity
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Asking structured, progressive questions
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Checking for potential, not just pattern match
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Managing bias – both conscious and unconscious
None of this comes for free just because someone is a practitioner at a skill or a senior developer. The opposite is also true – someone I know quite well is an average developer but a fantastic interviewer. He makes candidates comfortable, understands their strengths, pressure tests for weaknesses, gives fantastic interview feedback, and more often than not – makes the right hiring call.
When Interviewers Aren’t Trained, Bias Fills the Gap
When panelists aren’t prepared, they fall back on what feels safe.
They look for candidates who:
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Think the way they think
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Use the tools they’ve used
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Have solved the problems they’ve solved
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Ask the same questions they would ask
This isn’t intentional or malicious. It’s just natural. The tragedy is that many rejected candidates could have succeeded brilliantly if the panel had been equipped to recognize potential rather than familiarity.
And here’s the double whammy.
There Is No Cost to Interviewing Poorly
When a panelist does a poor interview, nothing happens.
If a candidate fails it’s attributed to “candidate quality” or blamed on recruiters or written off as “the market being bad”.
No one asks if the interview was well structured? Were the questions fair and progressive? Did we actually test what matters for the role? Did we create space for the candidate to show range?
Interviewers are never reviewed the way candidates are. So the system silently optimizes for rejection.
And here’s the other thing:
Culture Decides Whether You Hire or Not
Company culture plays a massive role in how interviewers behave. Some companies wear rejection as a badge of honor. How often do you hear this – “Very few people clear our interviews.”, “Our interviews are tougher than FAANG companies”, “We have a very high bar.”
This culture sends signals to panelists to reject proudly. The result? They don’t hire. Not because talent doesn’t exist, but because the culture rewards saying no.
I know of a company that has a world-class tech team. The leadership team insists on looking for potential, they provide the space to learn, and they hire for trajectory, not just past environments. These companies almost without exception hire better and faster.
The Blind Spot That’s Hard to Believe
What’s mind-boggling is this. Companies will redesign org structures, change recruiters, buy expensive hiring tools, rewrite job descriptions repeatedly but they won’t spend time training their interview panelists. They assume interviewing is a natural skill.
In professional sports, no one assumes everyone can be a selector.
Selection committees are chosen after serious deliberation. Former players, experienced coaches, and talent scouts are picked not just for their success, but for their ability to evaluate others objectively. Their role is clearly defined: identify talent, not personal replicas. They are trained to look beyond surface performance. Crucially, selectors are held accountable.
If the team performs poorly over a season, questions are asked not just of players, but of the selection committee itself. Their decisions are reviewed. Patterns are examined. Biases are challenged. Over time, poor selectors are replaced (anyone remember Chetan Sharma and co getting sacked?).
Since I’m anyway laying out the bad news, let me pile on one more thing.
The One-Week Fallacy
Many candidates are rejected for skills that can be learned in a week, are tool-specific, not fundamental, and could be irrelevant six months into the role. Instead of asking “Can this person learn this quickly?”, we ask: “Have they already done this exactly the way we do it?” That’s not hiring. That’s filtering for familiarity.
The Real Fix Is Uncomfortable (Which Is Why It’s Avoided)
If companies truly want to fix hiring, they need to start where it’s hardest:
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Train interviewers
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Calibrate panels
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Review interviewer performance
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Change the cultural signals around rejection
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Reward identifying potential, not just saying no
Until then, companies will keep repeating the same complaint – “We just can’t find good people”. The irony is that they’re probably interviewing them every week.