Remember when “manager” meant the person who decided who got hired? It still does. We just stopped pretending they were qualified to do it.
I spent twenty years inside Talent Acquisition before I went out on my own. I sat through the calibration meetings. I wrote the offer letters. I owned the funnel metrics. I argued with finance about agency spend, and I argued with hiring managers about feedback. For two decades, I watched the same pattern from the inside, and one of the reasons I eventually left is that I wanted to be able to say it out loud.
The pattern is this: strong candidates getting passed over for reasons that, when you say them out loud, make you tilt your head.
“Her handshake was weak.”
“He didn’t ask the right kind of questions.”
“She seemed like she’d want my job in two years.”
“Something about his energy was off.”
I have a running list…Twenty years’ worth. I’ll tell you something uncomfortable: I wrote some of those rejection notes myself, early in my career, before I knew better. That’s how I know the problem isn’t malice. It’s training.
Here’s the thing, and I want to say it clearly: I’m not actually mad at the hiring managers.
Some of the best performing employees I’ve ever worked with were terrible interviewers. They were good at their actual jobs. They wanted to get this right. They were also, almost without exception, doing it without a playbook.
We keep handing people enormous decisions, six-figure salary commitments, team chemistry, retention risk, candidate experience, employer brand, and never teach them how to make those decisions well.
Consider the first thing most newly promoted managers are asked to do. Backfill themselves. Hire the person who will take over the role they just left. It is one of the highest-leverage decisions of their early management career, often happening within weeks of the title change, and almost no one is given any preparation for it. They are interviewing for a job they understand intimately, but they have never been taught how to translate that understanding into structured questions, fair evaluation, or a defensible decision. So they wing it. And the first hire they make sets the tone for every hire that follows. After enough years in the seat, you can spot it within two weeks of a kickoff: whether a manager has interviewed at this level before, or whether they are about to learn in public on someone else’s career.
Companies train new managers on performance reviews. They train them on giving feedback. They train them on running 1:1s. They train them on the new expense system, for cying out loud.
And yet, they do not train them on interviewing.
The assumption is that interviewing is a thing you absorb, like breathing or office politics. It isn’t. It’s a discipline with decades of research behind it. Structured interviews outperform unstructured ones by every measurable margin, and yet most companies are still running pattern-matching exercises dressed up as a hiring process. A senior leader meets a candidate, has a feeling, and the feeling becomes the verdict.
Then the rejection notes come back.
“Not a culture add.”
“I just couldn’t see it.”
“Felt like she’d be hard to work with.”
And someone has to call a candidate, someone who passed four other rounds, someone who would have done the job, and tell them no, because the person at the end of the funnel had a vibe.
The cost is real, and finance can see it. Vibe rejections extend time-to-fill. They push hiring managers toward whichever candidate happens to clear the same vibe bar at the eleventh hour, often at a 25% markup. They cost referral relationships when strong candidates get told “not quite the right fit” one too many times. It compounds.
And the part nobody wants to say out loud, the part I couldn’t say cleanly when I was in-house: the “vibe” is doing exactly what we’ve trained ourselves not to let it do. It’s pattern-matching to the existing team. Which is why the team keeps looking the same.
Here’s the hot take, and honestly it isn’t that hot if you’ve been in this seat long enough: the talent shortage we keep talking about is largely an interviewer shortage. There are great candidates. There just aren’t enough people equipped to recognize them when they’re sitting across the table.
So what actually works? In twenty years I saw a handful of teams get this right, and they all did some version of the same things:
Make interview training a prerequisite for being on a hiring panel. Not a nice-to have.
Start that training the day someone is promoted, before they ever screen their first replacement candidate.
Require structured interview guides. Same questions, same rubric, same scale. The discomfort of structure is the point.
Audit rejection reasons quarterly. If “culture fit” or “energy” is showing up a lot, it’s an interviewer problem, not a candidate problem.
Make hiring outcomes part of manager performance reviews. If their hires don’t stay, that’s a data point worth tracking.
I’ll keep collecting the rejection rationales. They’re funny in the way things are funny when they’re also a little sad. But the real article is this one: there’s a generation of leaders making the most expensive decisions in their org with the least amount of training to make them.