To ask how hiring managers decide who gets the job?

[HonestTealPoster]

For those of you who have been involved in recruitment, particularly as hiring managers or interview panel members, how do you ultimately decide which candidate to offer a job to?

Say, in situations where you’ve interviewed two or more strong candidates at the final stage.

Is it purely down to interview scores or do things like personality, rapport, team fit and overall impression influence the decision?

And how often is it a genuinely difficult decision between two candidates?

I think people are confusing wanting to select a candidate with the right attitude and the opaque concept of 'team fit'.

Most recruiters want someone who shows a positive attitude, comes across as friendly and personable and has some good communications skills. Those are completely normal criteria to judge someone on.

However to me a recruiter going on about 'team fit' is likely to refer to use it as a way to discard someone based on characteristics like age, appearance, accent, health/disability and social background. Basically things that the candidate has no control on and that are ultimately based on prejudices.

If people want to they can describe team fit specifically based on what they say. And yes it may lead to them not getting the best person for the job if they are narrow minded

people are more like to fail to get to interview if they don’t fit the profile however

but you can’t take bias out of system when interpersonal skills do matter - we are not machines, it’s not a case of tick all the boxes with the right skills and you will be a good fit. Because if it’s a sexist than any female will find it hard to work with the team anyway

if it’s just the formal interview they will find way to downgrade an answer to get the person they want

That's one way of looking at it. I think it would be harder to see a team when the candidate is much younger or older than the others.

For me it team fit would be about whether you could see them working together.
It's about whether one might try to dominate the group instead of complementing it.

I had an interview a few weeks ago. Was told I'd conducted myself well. Less than 2 hours later I had a phone call to say I had got the job. Then on my 2nd day I was there doing my training the person who hired me said how pleased he was with how I had fitted in and how he was glad he chose me. I think sometimes its if they can see you getting on well with them and how well they think you would fit in with the rest of the staff already there.