"Are your instincts about people famously top-notch? Are you the person on your team who always reads the room correctly?"
If you answered yes to either question, welcome to the club. Almost every hiring manager I've met believes some version of this about themselves. It's also nearly useless information fifteen minutes into a technical interview, when you're trying to work out whether the person in front of you can actually do the job.
Reading a room and evaluating a candidate's engineering ability are two different skills. Mixing them up is one of the most common, and most expensive, mistakes I see hiring teams make.
Reading People Isn't the Same as Evaluating Them
Gut feeling is real. It comes from thousands of small social interactions your brain has quietly filed away over the years, and for reading a room, sensing whether someone is upset, bored, or about to say yes, it's genuinely useful.
Hiring is a different problem. You're not sensing a mood in the room. You're trying to predict how someone will perform in a role over the next year or more, based on 45 minutes of conversation. Your intuition was never built for that, and treating it like it was is how "I really liked them" quietly becomes the whole evaluation.
What Daniel Kahneman Actually Said About Gut Feeling
Daniel Kahneman spent part of his career on exactly this problem, and his answer wasn't "ignore your gut." It was more precise than that.
His method: pick a handful of independent traits the role actually requires, six is the number he used, and score each one on its own, one at a time, before moving to the next. That way an early strong impression doesn't quietly colour every score that follows. Add the six scores together.
Only after that is gut feeling allowed in, and even then it gets exactly one question. Close your eyes, form a single holistic impression of the candidate, and give it one score, weighed the same as any one of the six trait scores, not as the lens you evaluated everything else through.
That's the part most hiring teams skip. They start with the gut feeling and let it colour every question that follows. Kahneman's version puts it last: one score out of several, not the deciding vote.
Hiring With Your Head, and Your Gut
Treavor Bogard argues intuition has real value in hiring when it's paired with emotional intelligence, then tested rather than acted on blindly. The instinct is a starting point for follow-up questions, not a verdict.
Read on Inside Higher Ed ➔When It Comes to Hiring, Don't Trust Your Intuition
Chad Biagini makes the opposite case: gut feeling in hiring is where bias hides best, and the fix is standardised interviews, trained interviewers, and outcomes you actually track over time.
Read on Forbes ➔What Actually Predicts Job Performance
The research backs this up. Structured interviews, the kind where every candidate answers the same questions against the same rubric, consistently predict job performance better than unstructured, gut-led conversations. Meta-analyses on the topic put structured interviews at roughly twice the predictive validity of unstructured ones.
At AssessDev, every technical assessment is scored dimension by dimension against a shared rubric, before anyone forms an overall opinion. Not because intuition has no place, but because it has exactly one place: at the end, worth one score, after the rubric has done its job.
The Payoff
None of this means interviewers should switch off their instincts. It means building a process where instinct is one input among several, not the whole evaluation.
Next time you catch yourself thinking "I just have a good feeling about this one," ask where that feeling would rank if it were only allowed to answer one question out of six.
Want a rubric you can start using today?
See our sample interview structure, compare models on the Tech Assessments page, or book an interviewer to have us run the whole process for you.
