Thank you to Darren Bush for featuring our work in this sharp piece on hiring, intuition, and structure, and to Hung Lee for including it in Recruiting Brainfood.
The article explores a tension many teams feel every day.
Hiring often feels like guessing.
The real risk is not intuition itself, but intuition that is untrained, uncalibrated, and applied inconsistently at scale.
Darren's article cover image shared the results of an analysis we run regularly at Informed Decisions across our clients’ data.
Here is how it works in practice.
Interviewers assess candidates by scoring a set of clearly defined, job-related skills during the interview.
Only after scoring those skills are they asked to provide an overall impression.
Because we capture both, we can analyze which skills actually drive that overall impression across hundreds and thousands of interviews.
One pattern shows up consistently.
𝗘𝗳𝗳𝗲𝗰𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝗖𝗼𝗺𝗺𝘂𝗻𝗶𝗰𝗮𝘁𝗼𝗿 is the strongest predictor of an interviewer’s overall impression.
In plain terms, this reflects how well a candidate tells a story and interviews. Not necessarily how strong they are at doing the job.
This does not mean communication is irrelevant. It means that without structure and feedback, interviewing ability often dominates hiring decisions more than job-relevant capability.
At Informed Decisions, we surface these insights for hiring teams and connect interview data to post-hire performance. That allows teams to see which skills truly predict success, which ones are overweighted, and how to rebalance decisions toward what actually matters on the job.
That is how you move past “trust your gut” and turn hiring into a system that improves over time.
