A new report is revealing what many frustrated job seekers have long suspected: It’s not what you know, but what your interviewers think about your personality that can get you the job.
In a Textio report published Tuesday, job candidates who received offers were significantly more likely to be described as having a “great personality” than those who didn’t get offers — and for men and women, that often meant wildly different things. To figure this out, Textio, a talent optimization platform commonly used by human resources professionals, analyzed 10,377 internal job interview assessments done by hiring managers and recruiters across more than 3,900 job candidates, mostly in North America.
What Textio found was that hiring teams for corporate roles, including marketing, legal, engineering and sales, were being swayed by a job candidate’s vibes. Shortly after job interviews, hiring managers used Textio’s platform to document internal feedback about a job candidate, and the type of feedback they were more likely to share was about a job candidate’s charm, “great energy” and “friendly” personality ― not their relevant skills. Ultimately, managers were more likely to hire people they liked.
Kieran Snyder, Textio co-founder and chief scientist emeritus, said the finding “shows that our bias begins before the person’s even hired. So candidates coming in, you see this real gendered impact of the way that they’re described.”
All vibes-hiring is bad. But gendered personality feedback can leave lasting impressions.
The kind of personality feedback women and men got after interviewing was radically different. According to the Textio report, women candidates who got job offers were more likely to be described by interviewers as “bubbly,” “pleasant” and “polite.” Meanwhile, men who got job offers were described as “level-headed,” “confident” and “strong.“
Being pleasantly bubbly is not a bad trait to have at work, but it’s not the kind of trait that will get you promoted, which is one reason why this feedback is problematic.
“Being friendly doesn’t get you a leadership opportunity,” Snyder said. “And so when we assess some groups of people — such as women, especially Black women and Latino women, for these attributes more than others ― we inherently set them up for fewer opportunities down the line.“
Sociologist Lauren Rivera, a professor of management and organizations at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, said the “bubbly” feedback women get is an example of the “fraught labyrinth” of how women get judged for both competence and warmth, citing the research of psychologist Alice Eagly on this topic.
“We disproportionately attune to women’s warmth when judging their underlying suitability,” Rivera explained. “We attune to the fact of ‘Are they friendly? Are they approachable?’ more than we do for men, and research has shown that there’s a backlash for women who are perceived as violating these kind of prescriptive gender stereotypes.”
The Textio data set of written interview assessments didn’t contain metadata about candidate race and ethnicity, but previous research has found that women of color face what researchers call “double jeopardy,” because they deal with both gender and racial biases at work. Black women professionals are more likely to receive subjective feedback that they are “difficult” or “angry,” for example.
Ironically, the candidates who got relevant feedback about their skills were the candidates being rejected. Successful job candidates were being praised for their good vibes, while rejected candidates got skills-related takedowns.
“The candidates who didn’t get offers, they had more feedback, actually, that was written about them, but less of it commented on their personality, and more of it commented on their skills,” Snyder said. In Snyder’s view, “it’s because interviewers feel more compelled to justify a no-hire decision.”
Why not hire people you like to work with? It’s not bad to want to hang out with your colleagues, but that should not be the reason you hire and promote them.
The Textio report is just the latest showing Americans love to hire for “chemistry” or “cultural fit” over relevant skills and performance. Rivera, who has conducted several studies on this topic, said that many hiring managers use shared interest in sports or mutual passion for “Love Is Blind” as indicators of a good coworker.
“We use that liking and that similarity as a proxy for: Are they going to be collegial?” Rivera said. But “just because you like someone in the moment, on the basis of a 20-minute conversation, doesn’t mean they will actually be a respectful or helpful coworker, but we confuse those two things.”
“We’re overestimating the degree to which liking is actually relevant, and overestimating the degree to which we can actually grow to like people who are different from us,” she said.
And if managers keep doing this, they will not only lose out on great candidates, they will lose great performers, too. Job feedback about your personality ― even when it’s about how wonderful you are to work with ― is a lose-lose for everyone involved. Snyder said high performers “tend to get ‘Great job. Keep going, good for you.’ And what we’ve seen in prior research is that when the feedback is low-quality, even if it’s positive, people are more likely to quit.“
To avoid subjective judgments like “not a good fit,” job interviewers should ideally ask each candidate about their relevant knowledge, skills and abilities they can bring to the role with the same questions, in the same order. Rivera suggested interviewers avoid icebreaker questions like, “What do you like to do in your spare time?” to make sure candidates are not being judged on shared interests.
But for now, reports like Textio’s show that this kind of fair, less-biased interviewing is still not happening enough.
“We’re not looking at the right place. We’re not looking at their skills and behaviors,” Snyder said. “We’re looking at how they make us feel.”
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