Hiring Beyond the Resume and the Competencies Checklist

Two stories of when vibes were the missing piece of the hiring puzzle

I stared at my Google Meet screen. It was the final round for a senior product leader position on my team, and the candidate was nailing it. The candidate was very well-prepared and confident. He answered every question with confidence, practically ticking all the boxes on my competency checklist:

• Problem Solving ✅

• Structured thinking ✅

• Data & metrics understanding ✅

• Customer Obsession: ✅

• Business Acumen ✅

• Quality of experience: ✅

• Complexity handled in the past: ✅

But despite the flawless performance, something didn’t feel right. There was this… unease.

In the debrief, everyone—from another product leader to the co-founders—raved about him. They were ready to hand me a pen to sign the offer letter. I was almost ready too, but I couldn’t shake the feeling. I wasn’t getting the right vibe.

When I dug further with the other product interviewer, he reemphasized the candidate's stellar performance but noted feeling uncomfortable with his apparent smugness. At this point, I decided to conduct an informal background check within my network. Two people who worked with him five years apart gave the same feedback: He acted like the smartest person in the room and didn’t hesitate to let everyone know it!

Effectively, the background check confirmed my vibes, and we passed—dodging not just a bullet, but a missile of trouble!

I wish I could say I trusted my gut after that. But a few months later, I ignored those same instincts—and paid the price

A few months later, I was hiring a content writer, and the recruiter found the perfect candidate. The resume almost mirrored the job description. The portfolio was stellar; her technical blogs were well-researched and crisp and the non-technical pieces were thought-provoking! Her Twitter feed? A completely different story. Her stand on some political policies, especially her intentional jibes at a specific religion left me a bit uneasy.

I don’t usually mix religion & politics with work and since the religion being commented on was her own (same as mine), I opted to keep an open mind and invited her to the interview loop, which she aced!

However, throughout the interview, my inner voice kept screaming, "Trouble ahead. She doesn't sound genuine." But since I couldn’t pinpoint exactly what was wrong, I pushed those thoughts aside. I reminded myself that I needed to respect people's right to have different opinions outside of work. We went ahead and rolled out an offer, which she accepted!

What followed was a no-show on joining day, followed by unanswered calls and emails from HR. Then came a report on her Twitter hyperactivity before she resurfaced two days later, citing medical emergencies and Twitter activity as a way to manage stress.

I wasn’t convinced but gave her the benefit of the doubt. She joined the next day, but by the end of day one, she was completely incommunicado again: No show in meetings, no replies on WhatsApp, and no responses to HR's calls.

By the end of it, I was down a team member. On the plus side, I learned about the elusive “absconding employee policy”, something I hadn’t even known existed until it happened.

These experiences led me to post on LinkedIn, where I was surprised by the overwhelming support for trusting vibes.

As an old friend summed it up best:

A vibe or instinct you get after about 30 minutes into the interaction/interview is usually a result of our internal data processing through patterns, experiences, and a healthy dose of bias 😊... it's not a bad thing, that's what makes us perceptive humans.

Another experienced hiring manager shared a personal anecdote:

Never underestimate the vibes we get in our discussions, the soft signals are so important. I was speaking with a candidate, young, sharp, and passionate. He blew me away with his answers to my challenges, but I got a little vibe … something told me it’s great he was damn right, but does he respect others’ viewpoints? 

So I asked, “Tell me something that you later found out to be wrong, or you were wrong.” His answer made my reading of the vibe right: “I have never been wrong, I don’t like when someone challenges me when I know I’m right.” Thank you very much - my decision was made easy!

These messages left me wondering why we do not overtly acknowledge the role of vibes. Why have we made the hiring process objective to the point of being almost mechanical and devoid of any human touch? Hiring decisions at one of the most respected employers on the planet are made by a hiring committee, whose members never met the candidate by reading reports from the interviewers who didn’t talk to each other throughout the process!

Partly, the reason is obvious. Our vibes often stem from unconscious (sometimes even conscious) biases. We all tend to lean towards “people like us”: Being too vibes-dependent may make your hiring process discriminatory without you even realizing it. By making every interviewer in charge of specific competencies and making the hiring process standardized, companies are trying to be more inclusive and focusing on finding the best talent. 

If I had to choose between “vibes” and “competencies”, I would lean towards going ahead with a candidate who aced the interview on every competency. I have heard of entrepreneurs, who hired their first engineer because they liked him based on the resume and a non-technical conversation (and didn’t know how to test them, only to regret it by the time it’s too late! Sometimes, this is the primary reason that the startup fails!¹

But does it have to be a binary choice? Why not make a vibe check an integral part of the hiring process? Why not have a debrief including every interviewer and discuss explicitly not just the feedback on competencies, but also how they felt while talking to the candidate? If more than one interviewer did feel a similar negative vibe, probably it would be the time to apply the golden rule of hiring “When in doubt, do not hire!”

It’s not about choosing between vibes and competencies. It’s about knowing when to trust your instincts and when to back them up with data. To paraphrase a famous Russian proverb: Trust your vibes, but verify with evidence.

1. Paul Graham’s legendary essay on “Why Startups Fail”