Dr John Sullivan Talent Management Thought Leadership

It may seem like a simple thing, but honest candidate assessments from every interviewer are essential for great hiring. So hiring managers must realize that during the discussion period after the candidate departs, they (prematurely) reveal their assessment of the candidate.

The manager is essentially “freezing” any contradictory assessments that would normally come from the remaining interviewers. Rather than receiving a wide range of honest and often contradictory (a good thing) candidate assessments. Instead, in deference to their manager, you will mostly only hear interviewer assessments that support the manager’s viewpoint.

As a result of this “forced consensus,” you will end up limiting your hiring to candidates that your manager prefers. This approach will be damaging to a team that needs an influx of new ideas in order to drive productivity and innovation.

Of all candidate assessment steps, interviews have the highest impact on great hiring.

Premature Manager Assessments Create Many Problems

Unfortunately, few hiring managers are willing to accept the fact that the typical unstructured interview is a major contributor to new-hire failure rates that approach 50%. 

Fortunately, most interview results can be significantly improved by adding just a little structure to your interview process. The highest-impact and easiest-to-implement structural change that I recommend is encouraging hiring managers to limit their influence both during the interview and later during the discussion afterward. The four highest-impact problems that can be created by excessive manager influence include: 

1. Biased manager behavior during the interview will limit the honest questioning by others – long before the candidate leaves the room. Many interview team members may already be aware that their hiring manager has a strong preference for or against the candidate. And that manager’s perspective often reveals itself in their question selection, voice inflection, and body language. This indication of a strong manager will often discourage other interviewers from asking tough questions or even probing apparent concerns. In order not to contradict or challenge their manager. 
2. Limiting the free flow of interview questions may cause you to lose top candidates – once interviewers realize that they will be prevented from fully expressing their full opinions. Many will unconsciously lower their enthusiasm for all interviews and hiring. And if your candidate senses this lack of interviewer enthusiasm and candor. They will be less likely to remain in your interview process and to accept an offer. 
3. The lack of in-depth assessment may mean that candidate flaws will be missed – after a hiring manager has expressed a strong positive or negative opinion towards a particular candidate during the discussion period. Other interviewers aren’t likely to bring up anything contradictory. And failing to point out these flaws could cause the team to hire candidates with major weaknesses. That will hurt productivity and, in the future, add to the increased need for more replacement hires.
4. Team collaboration and productivity will suffer with a lower level of new hire ownership by teammates – many team members who participate in interviews are unnecessarily influenced by their hiring managers. They don’t feel like they own the hiring process or the candidates that are hired. So without “a sense of ownership” of the hiring process, many team members will consider the new hire to be the manager’s responsibility. And without a high level of employee ownership, employees will likely provide less mentoring, help, and guidance to the new hire. And in a similar vein, this excessive manager influence will cause your recruiters to be less engaged and more frustrated when they feel that their opinions and concerns are not to be listened to by their hiring manager.

Actionable Steps That Will Reduce Hiring Manager Influence Problems

Fortunately, the manager influence problems that occur during and after interviews can be mitigated without a lot of time or money. So here are five suggested remedy actions that you should consider.

1. Educate your hiring managers and interviewers about the problems – help build support for this change by developing a compelling business case for individual hiring managers and interviewers. So they fully understand the many areas of damage that are caused by premature manager influence. So that everyone involved in interviewing will accept ownership of this problem.
2. Make it a requirement for managers to reduce their inappropriate influence – make everyone who interviews aware of the rule that managers shouldn’t reveal their preferences during the interview. And that they should hold their comments until the very end of the post-interview discussion period. 
3. Increase total interviewer candor by requiring an anonymous interview scoresheet for providing feedback – in addition to withholding premature manager comments. You can also improve interview accuracy by providing each interviewer with an interview scoresheet. It makes it more likely that recorded interviewer assessments will be limited to job-related areas. In addition, if you make this scoresheet anonymous, you will provide an additional opportunity for even more dissenting feedback from each interviewer.
4. Video every interview in order to identify problems – the subtle video recording of interviews provides many benefits. First, having access to the recorded interviews makes it easier to go back and assess if and when improper influence occurred. This documentation can also provide evidence that nothing illegal occurred during the interview. 
5. Provide first-time interviewers with job-related questions – in order to ensure that first-time interviewers don’t ask anything illegal or ask non-job-related questions. I suggest that it is better to be proactive and to minimize any new interviewer uncertainty by providing them with allowable job-related questions for this open job. It’s also a good idea to provide them with a range of good to great answers for each question. Also, provide everyone involved in interviewing with overall interview training on your company’s website. 

Final Thoughts

Trying to overhaul your entire interview process is almost always extremely painful and time-consuming. So instead of a complete revamp. I recommend that you improve your interview accuracy by starting with “low-hanging fruit” interview-related actions that cost little but have proven to have a great impact. In this case, it only requires hiring managers to minimize the unnecessary revealing of their candidate preferences during the actual interview. And then revealing their bias prematurely during the post-interview discussion. As a result, over several hires, your team will become more productive, collaborative, and innovative.

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Notes for the reader

This is the latest article from Dr. Sullivan, who was called “the Michael Jordan of Hiring” by Fast Company.

Please help spread his ideas by sharing this with your team/network and posting it on your favorite social media.

Dr. John Sullivan is its author – It first appeared in the 11/3/26 issue of Aggressive Talent Management.