Are You Really Hiring the Right People — or Just Those Who Feel Right?

Recruiting the right staff is one of the most critical — and difficult — tasks any organisation faces. A single hiring decision can ripple through a company quickly, influencing productivity, culture, and morale to name a few. Yet even the most seasoned recruiters and hiring managers fall prey to a subtle psychological trap that quietly impacts who is and isn’t actually hired.

The fancy name is confirmation bias, otherwise known as a ‘bad hire’ or ‘the wrong person’.

It’s not about a lack of skill or care — it’s simply human nature.

What Is Confirmation Bias?

I am sure most of you already know this, but just in case, confirmation bias is our brain’s tendency to notice information that supports what we already believe — and ignore what doesn’t.  Social Media empires are often based on the premise that feeding people information to support what they already believe to be true keeps them coming back.  As humans, we love to feel we are ‘right’.

Once we decide “this candidate seems great,” our minds automatically start looking for proof that we’re right.  We interpret their answers more positively. We overlook small warning signs.  And before we know it, we’ve convinced ourselves they’re the perfect fit.

It feels like intuition, but it’s often bias dressed up as confidence.

Why It Matters

When bias influences recruitment, the effects reach far beyond one hire.  It can quietly damage team morale, weaken trust, and limit diversity of thought — the very thing that drives innovation and high performance.

Over time, teams can become echo chambers where new ideas struggle to surface.  Whilst productivity, culture and morale seem to be healthy in the short term, a company will struggle in the longer term to meet the challenges of the market because poor decisions are let through and often praised.

Here’s a not so ridiculous example.  A company is hiring for a new Sales Manager.  The company’s CEO has recently said that we need to make the company more fun and so we should hire people who are fun.  At interview, a candidate offers up plenty of great jokes and confirms they would be a hoot to have around. ‘Imagine how much fun the office will be’.  And because he is fun, he would be great with our clients because we need to give them more fun.

How to Reduce It

As with most things, the first step in overcoming any problem is to acknowledge it exists in the first place.  Unless recruiters, hiring managers and leaders accept that this phenomenon exists, there is no solution.

Here are several other ideas to reduce this phenomenon:

At Optimum Consulting, we believe great recruitment isn’t just about finding talent — it’s about understanding human behaviour and making decisions based on evidence, not instinct.  It’s something we take care to be conscious of.

So here’s a question for you:
Have you ever caught yourself justifying a hiring decision that didn’t quite work out — even when the signs were there from the start?