Your Hiring Managers’ Gut Feeling Is Bias With Better PR

Picture the moment before the real interview even starts: a candidate chats with the receptionist, sends a follow-up email with just the right tone, laughs on cue in the waiting room. According to a new Express Employment Professionals-Harris Poll survey, that is exactly the moment carrying the most weight. Sixty-one percent of hiring managers say informal interactions, including small talk before or after the interview and email tone, are their most common way of judging whether a candidate’s personality fits. It is unmanaged bias with a confidence badge pinned to it.

87% Say They Can Tell in the First Conversation

The survey’s most striking number is this: 87% of hiring managers say they can tell from the first conversation whether a candidate will succeed at their company, including 38% who strongly agree. The survey does not report whether those early judgments were checked against actual performance data, promotion rates or turnover. It measures confidence, not accuracy, and confidence is cheap.

That certainty runs in one direction. 61% of job seekers say they worry about how their personality comes across during an interview. The hiring manager walks away sure of a verdict reached before the structured questions even begin, while the candidate walks away managing an impression they cannot fully control.

What Counts as Assessment Is Mostly Guesswork

Ask job seekers how they think they were evaluated, and 94% say companies have assessed their personality during hiring. The methods break down like this:

• Informal interactions: 47%
• Situational questions: 46%
• Behavioral interview questions: 45%
• Reference checks: 43%
• Personality assessments: 37%

The two most defensible methods on that list, behavioral interview questions and personality assessments, rank behind three that lean on tone, small talk and an interviewer’s own reaction rather than structured evidence. That ordering describes how most hiring actually happens.

86% Say Personality Can Outweigh a Candidate’s Skills Gap

Here is the number that should concern every VP of talent acquisition reading this: 86% of hiring managers say personality can overcome a candidate’s skills gap. Ninety-one percent already say personality matters as much as skills. We think the exposure sits hardest in technical or high-stakes roles, where the skills gap is the entire reason the requisition exists in the first place.

In our work with hiring teams, the interviewers who insist they know a candidate will work out within minutes are consistently the ones whose evaluation notes contain the least structured evidence. Mostly impressions, rarely behavior tied to the actual job. Those notes reveal an absence of process, dressed up as instinct.

The Traits Are Real. The Measurement Is Not.

The strongest pushback to this argument sits inside the survey’s own data. Hiring managers and job seekers converge tightly on which traits matter most:

• Reliability: 66% of hiring managers, 65% of job seekers
• Honesty: 63% of hiring managers, 58% of job seekers
• Adaptability: 55% of hiring managers, 51% of job seekers

Work ethic now ranks as absolutely essential to six in 10 hiring managers, up from 54% in spring of 2025. These are legitimate, job-relevant behaviors, not vague vibes, and any reasonable hiring process should care about them.

Agreement on the right traits does not validate the wrong method for reading them. Gen X and baby boomers are more likely than Gen Z and millennials to believe they possess these traits. Baby boomers are also more likely than every other generation to believe companies value each trait on the list except flexibility. If a hiring manager’s read of honesty or reliability tracks generational identity as much as it tracks the candidate in front of them, that read is not insight. It is a filter that quietly favors whoever already looks familiar.

The Staffing Industry Has a Reason to Like This Story

“Every employee has an effect on the workplace beyond the responsibilities listed in a job description,” said Bob Funk Jr., CEO, president and chairman of Express Employment International. “The right personality can build trust, make change easier to navigate and raise the standard for how a team works together.” That justifies why personality matters after someone is hired. It says nothing about how a company should identify it during an interview.

Express Employment Professionals is a staffing company. It commissioned a poll that concludes, conveniently, that first impressions and personality reads are more valuable than the industry has previously credited. That does not make the underlying data wrong, but the recommendation that follows, lean harder on personality, deserves less benefit of the doubt than the raw percentages suggest.

None of this means personality is irrelevant to hiring. It means the current method for reading it, informal chat weighted more heavily than structured evidence, produces inconsistent, hard-to-defend outcomes at scale. When 61% of personality assessment runs through small talk and email tone, the result is a liability with a friendly face, repeating with every interview. Read your own interview notes back and count how much of that verdict is evidence rather than instinct.

Original reporting: Morningstar.