‘Polish over potential’: How hiring for personality vs. skills is costing employers
In the high-stakes domain of talent acquisition, a troubling reality is undermining even the most sophisticated hiring processes: employers choosing candidates they like over those who can actually do the job.
New research from talent optimization platform Textio spells out what many recruiters have long suspected. After analyzing more than 10,000 interviews among nearly 4,000 candidates, it found that those who receive job offers are 12 times more likely to be described as having a “great personality” than those who don’t.
“Too many hiring teams rely on memory, gut instinct or informal messages to capture what happened in an interview,” said Kieran Snyder, co-founder and chief scientist emeritus at Textio. “Unfortunately, memory fades, gut instincts are often unreliable and informal messages aren’t a hiring system.”
The preference for likability over capability comes with real consequences. When companies prioritize personality over performance metrics, they face higher turnover rates, increased replacement costs and potential legal exposure, according to the research. Even more concerning, these hires often reinforce existing biases in the workplace.
Sofia Lyateva, CMO at hiring platform nPloy, sees these challenges daily. “One of the greatest dangers with ‘vibe hiring’ is how it reinforces bias,” she said. “When we rely on that ‘gut feeling,’ we have a tendency to unconsciously prefer candidates that are like us — our backgrounds, our experiences. This creates teams where everyone thinks and acts the same, unintentionally excluding excellent talent simply because they don’t appear a certain way.”
The Textio study reveals troubling patterns in how these likability assessments play out across gender lines. Female candidates are described as “bubbly” 25 times more often than men and “pleasant” 11 times more frequently. Meanwhile, men are labeled “level-headed” 7.5 times more often and “confident” 7 times more than women.
Such personality-based assessments don’t just influence who gets hired — they also impact who is likely to get internal feedback. The study found that 84% of rejected candidates never received any notes on their interviews, robbing them of valuable insights for improvement.
Dean Batson, faculty instructor at Arizona State University, believes the issue runs even deeper than the statistics suggest. “Most recruiter screeners aren’t experts in the roles they’re hiring for, so they lean hard on what they can evaluate — how someone communicates, how confident they seem, whether they ‘feel right,'” he said. “By the time a hiring manager gets involved, the pool is already filtered for vibe. Of course, the final hires are statistically more likable — those are the only candidates who made it through.”
It creates what Batson calls a “systems problem” where polished delivery is confused with actual competence.
Experts agree that the solution requires systematic changes to how organizations approach hiring. Hiring directors are advised to:
Implement structured, skills-based assessments. “There is no substitute for structured, skills-based assessment,” Snyder said. “This begins with systematic rubrics that HR defines for the organization to use in assessing employees and candidates alike.”
Use anonymized screening. Lyateva recommends stripping out identifying details like names and photos during the first sift of candidates to enable hiring managers to “concentrate on what actually matters: a candidate’s experience, skills and what they can actually do.”
Provide meaningful feedback. When candidates invest significant time in the interview process, closing the feedback loop becomes essential. Snyder suggests that can be as simple as informing a candidate about a particular strength they demonstrated in the interview process — and ideally a skill to keep developing — when calling to close them out.
The challenge for HR leaders is creating hiring processes that evaluate candidates based on demonstrated skills as opposed to subjective impressions. As Batson puts it, “Some of the most capable students I’ve ever taught wouldn’t stand out in a single interview, and I would’ve passed them over. That’s not a hiring flaw — that’s a hiring system built to reward polish over potential.”