Why Are We Yelling?: The Art of Productive Disagreement

by Buster Benson

“strong hire” and “no hire” decisions. The most common way this construction happens is through pattern matching based on stereotypes around gender, ethnicity, religion, and age—all protected characteristics that you aren’t legally permitted to discriminate based on. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen, because our associations with these characteristics are often unconscious in the first place. Given limited information, we have no way of evaluating an entire person and will use every proxy we can for signals that point to personality traits, competencies, and other soft skills that are evaluated during the interview process. We use these stereotypes to project thought patterns and future behavior on people. We also favor details that are familiar to us over details that are unfamiliar—our small talk is a subtle way of finding things we have in common with others, which will sway our general opinion of a person. Take, for example, feedback like “The candidate wasn’t able to give a convincing answer to the question I had about how they solved this problem” or “I didn’t feel like they’d be able to rally a team of engineers behind them.” There’s no easy way to tie this feedback to unconscious biases, even when we’re evaluating our own opinions! When I interviewed a few directors of hiring at places I’ve worked in the past, they unanimously acknowledged that this was a known and unfortunately unavoidable situation. You can try reminding interviewers to focus on evaluating spe...