My Fatal Hiring Error

A decade ago, as I walked out of an interview, I smugly told my senior developer that I can evaluate a candidate in the first 30 seconds. He stared at me.

“Would you have hired me in the first 30 seconds?”

He was an extremely talented, intelligent, and skilled individual, but was pretty introverted and shy. He was in place before I started, so I wasn’t the person that hired him. I would like to think I would have hired him after a full interview, but his question hit hard.

First impressions are so powerful they can imprint mental opinions very quickly. The candidate begins the interview at a disadvantage (or advantage) before they’ve gotten started. We’re humans, and when we make mistakes we need to learn from them. That lesson years ago changed every Interview since.