There is a separate line of research, initiated by the works of Nalini Ambady and Robert Rosenthal in the 1990s: people form a lasting impression of another person within mere seconds of observation — an effect dubbed thin-slicing, "thin slices". In some tasks, these instantaneous evaluations are surprisingly accurate.
The problem starts when their accuracy is extrapolated to tasks for which it was never confirmed — for instance, predicting a candidate's job performance.
What hiring research shows: the unstructured interview is one of the weakest predictors of future performance, significantly inferior to work samples, cognitive ability tests, and structured interviews. Yet interviewers perceive it as one of the most reliable tools. This is the crux of the problem: the gap is not in the quality of the evaluation, but in the confidence placed in it.
Next, a mechanism kicks in that renders this gap invisible.
The impression formed in the first minutes does not remain a neutral background — it begins to drive the interview itself. A candidate who is liked is asked questions that provide an opportunity to open up; a candidate who is disliked is asked questions that confirm doubts. By the end of the conversation, the interviewer possesses a genuinely felt confirmation of their initial intuition, which they themselves have gathered.
It is worth noting separately: an interviewer who "senses people" is not lying — subjectively, the confidence is completely real. It's just that the feeling of accuracy and actual accuracy are different things, and in hiring, they systematically diverge.
What helps:
a structured interview with identical questions and a pre-defined scale;
recording the rating for each criterion before general discussion so that the opinion of the first speaker does not rewrite the rest;
work samples instead of talking about skills;
and the most underrated practice — feedback on one's own decisions: verifying how the selected candidates performed after six months. Without this, the interviewer's intuition remains uncalibrated for years.