By Lee Flanagan
A viral post told candidates to avoid the 11am interview slot. It never came close to proving that timing decides who gets hired. What it did do was get a recruitment executive on record admitting how much of hiring runs on vibes rather than criteria. “You can have the sharpest resume in the room and still lose to someone who simply fits the room better,” says Sarbojit Mallick, co-founder of Instahyre, in comments to India Today. That is not a law of nature. It is a description of an interview process with no shared standard for what “fits the room” is even supposed to mean.
The Filter Metaphor Gets the Diagnosis Half Right
Mallick’s framing is useful. Hiring, he says, is “not an exam where the highest scorer wins; it’s a filter, and filters reward timing, polish and familiarity as often as they reward talent.” He is right that hiring behaves like a filter rather than an exam. Where we part company is the implication that this is simply how filters work. A filter is an engineered thing. If yours rewards polish and familiarity over evidence of skill, that is a design flaw in the filter, not a property of filtering itself. Structured interviewing exists precisely to fix this: define what you are testing for before the conversation starts, and score every candidate against the same criteria. That fix is decades old, and most organisations still are not using it.
A Referral Shortcut Is a Design Choice, Not Fate
Mallick also offers a specific number: “Referred candidates are roughly four times more likely to get hired than someone applying cold, often before they’ve said a word.” That figure is Mallick’s own claim, not a verified industry study, and it should be read as one recruiter’s estimate rather than settled data. Directionally, though, it tracks with what we see across TA teams. Referrals let a candidate skip the part of the process where evidence gets gathered, and get judged instead on who vouched for them. That is a network shortcut, not a merit signal. Skills-based, structured evaluation exists specifically to stop a warm introduction from substituting for proof of capability. If your process lets a referral bypass the same rubric everyone else has to clear, you have not discovered that hiring is unpredictable. You have discovered that your process has a hole in it.
Blood Sugar Is a Symptom, Not a Mystery
The line that should sting most: “Your resume gets you into the conversation, but from there it’s your interviewer’s blood sugar, an algorithm’s blind spot, or a friend on the inside deciding who gets the offer.” Mallick presents this as an inevitable feature of a human process. Our read is that decision fatigue and inconsistent, unscripted evaluation are exactly what a shared scorecard and a structured interview guide exist to neutralise. An interviewer running from memory, with no fixed questions and no documented rubric, will vary by mood, by time of day, by how the last candidate performed. An interviewer working from a scorecard captured against agreed criteria will not. The variance Mallick describes is not proof that hiring cannot be made consistent. It is a description of what happens when nobody has bothered to make it consistent.
AI Didn’t Remove the Bias, It Relocated It
AI screening has not eliminated subjectivity in hiring. It has simply moved where bias and human judgement show up. That matches what we see across hiring teams: a tool bolted onto a broken process does not fix the process. It automates the same undocumented, criteria-free judgement calls at greater speed and scale, then hides them behind a model instead of a person. Screening software without a defined, skills-based standard for what a good candidate looks like does not remove the interviewer’s blind spot. It just gives the blind spot a new address.
The Real Myth Isn’t Meritocracy
India Today’s piece lands on the idea that the greatest myth is believing recruitment has always been entirely objective. That thesis does not go far enough. The bigger myth is treating inconsistency as something hiring teams have to live with. Structured interviewing, shared evaluation criteria and documented evidence have been available as a fix for a long time. What is missing in most organisations is not a discovery that hiring is subjective. It is the discipline to close the gap between knowing that and doing something about it. If your VPs of TA are still comfortable calling inconsistent outcomes a lottery, ask them why they have not standardised how their interviewers evaluate. That question is overdue, not unanswerable.
Original reporting: India Today.
Frequently asked questions
Is the claim that referred candidates are ‘four times more likely’ to get hired a verified statistic?
No. That figure comes from Sarbojit Mallick, co-founder of Instahyre, as his own claim reported by India Today, not a formal study. It should be treated as one recruiter’s estimate, not an industry-wide finding.
Does structured interviewing remove the referral advantage entirely?
Structured interviewing does not stop someone from getting a referral in the first place. It does mean every candidate, referred or not, gets scored against the same predefined criteria rather than judged on who vouched for them.
Does AI screening remove bias from hiring, or just move it?
AI shifts where bias appears rather than removing it. Any screening tool still needs a defined, skills-based standard behind it, or it simply automates the same undocumented judgement calls at greater speed.
What does Mallick mean by calling hiring a ‘filter’ rather than an exam?
His point is that hiring does not simply rank candidates by score; it screens them through several subjective stages. A filter can still be built to reward evidence of skill over polish or familiarity, if the criteria are defined in advance.