Why Evidence Beats Gut Feel
Most hiring managers would say they trust their instincts, and most of the time, that instinct feels reliable in the moment. The uncomfortable research finding is that it usually isn't, not because hiring managers are bad at their jobs, but because gut feel in an interview setting is measuring something quite different from what it feels like it's measuring.
What gut feel is actually detecting
Research from the CIPD, the UK's professional body for HR, found that interviewers consistently rate candidates more favourably when those candidates resemble them, in background, hobbies, even how they dress. That's not a conscious bias anyone chooses. It's what "feeling right" about a candidate often actually is, familiarity, not capability.
The same research found identical CVs receiving meaningfully different callback rates purely based on how traditionally English the applicant's name appeared. Nothing about the candidate's actual qualifications changed. The instinct that decided differently wasn't evaluating skill, because there was no skill difference to evaluate.
Why this is so hard to notice from the inside
The reason gut feel is so persistent, despite the evidence against it, is that it doesn't feel like guessing. A confident "I've got a good feeling about this one" genuinely feels like pattern recognition built from experience. The research doesn't dispute that something real is being detected, it disputes that the thing being detected is job performance. More often, it's comfort, familiarity, or simply whether the conversation flowed easily, none of which reliably predicts whether someone will do the job well.
The alternative isn't "ignore instinct entirely"
Evidence-based hiring doesn't argue that human judgement has no place in a hiring decision. It argues that judgement should be applied to real evidence, watching what a candidate actually does when faced with a realistic situation from the role, rather than applied to a forty-five minute conversation optimised for likeability. The judgement stays. What changes is what it's judging.
A useful gut check
If your current process could be described honestly as "we get a feel for people and go with it," it's worth asking directly: a feel for what, exactly? If the honest answer is "whether I liked talking to them," that's worth being clear-eyed about, since it's a real, measurable thing, just not the thing a hiring decision is meant to measure.