Gut-Feel Recommendations

The hiring manager can’t check a feeling, so they discount it and start their own evaluation from the resume.

Your read can be wrong in either direction: the candidate you’d bet on has gaps you didn’t see, and the one you passed over is stronger than you thought.

And every confident call that doesn’t hold up teaches the client to trust your judgment a little less, including the calls you got right.

Experienced recruiters develop good instincts. In an interview you pick up dozens of signals: how the candidate explains a decision, what they skip over, how they talk about a failure.

Instinct gives you the answer and skips the reasoning. The signals behind it are never written down, and never compared with what this hiring manager said the role needs.

So your recommendation goes out as a conclusion with the resume attached. Nobody has tested it, not the hiring manager and not you.

Your instinct may be right. Until it’s checked against the evidence, it’s an assumption, even to you.

• You know what you think of a candidate before the interview ends, and nothing afterwards tests it.
• Your recommendation doesn’t point to a specific requirement or a specific answer.
• Going back over an interview changes your view of the candidate.
• A candidate you were sure about stalls over something you never checked.
• The hiring manager asks questions you can only answer from memory.

• The standard was never agreed. Without agreed requirements from the intake, there was nothing to measure against.
• The hiring manager wants their own evidence. Some hiring managers only trust what they see themselves.
• The candidate really was hard to read. Some interviews don’t produce clear evidence either way.