Hiring Is More About Vibes Than Merit—That Needs to Change

When it comes to recruiting, nobody seems to be winning these days. I’ve written quite a bit about all the issues that the average job-seeker has been facing over the past year, as well as how all those issues are compounding to make landing a job seem impossible these days. And on the flip side, hiring has never been more difficult for companies trying to fill those roles.

I thought I had uncovered most of the bigger, uglier holes in recruiting and hiring, if not all of them. Apparently, I hadn’t. Because I got this feedback on a recent post:

“If you really want to know what’s wrong with the recruiting process, give me a call.”

I mean, I can’t turn that down, right? I figured I’d either get blog post gold from the conversation, or a chance to listen to a wacko list out conspiracy theories for 25 minutes. Or maybe even a manifesto!

Unfortunately for me, but luckily for you, it was the former, not the latter. No secret societies. No tin foil hats. It was actually a pleasant conversation without an agenda.

But it uncovered something I missed. And it was kinda damning to recruiting and hiring.

When Conspiracy Becomes Reality

It turns out my source was a friend of a friend, who had been looking for a job in the tech sector for almost a year. He had read a couple of my columns on recruiting and the futility of finding a job in 2024, he discovered that he knew someone who knew me, and an intro was made.

I don’t want to vouch for the guy, because I don’t know him, but he seems solid. He has over 15 years of experience in tech, mostly software development with some lead and management experience. He started with a big name company you know and then spent time at two smaller but cutting-edge-tech companies I’d never heard of. The first small company collapsed at the beginning of Covid, and he was ousted from the second small company when it moved to offshoring this past January. 

He’s a nice guy, a little soft-spoken. But, like almost any coder, he’s confident and even funny when you get him talking. He has the beaten-down demeanor of being off the market for almost a year, and I saw hints that his melancholy was starting to form rough edges. 

And I get it. If he can’t find a job in this market, I can’t really blame anybody, even him. It’s rough out there.

Anyway, here’s the reason I took the call. The sentence that followed his opening sentence was this:

“Experience doesn’t mean anything anymore. It’s all about the vibes now.”

Vibes? I was just about to shrug him off but – since he was a friend of a friend and I needed to report back – I did a quick Google search on vibes and recruiting. 

Oh boy.

The Vibe Check

You know what “vibes” are, right?

Neither do I. 

I always thought they were some hippy-dippy kind of thing from before even my time. But vibes are making a comeback. They came up a lot during the election. And recently they’ve become a larger part of the recruiting and interview process. 

As I noted, my friend-of-friend has slogged through two long and difficult job searches over the past four years, the first in late 2020, and the second—much longer and much more difficult—through almost all of 2024. 

“What I’ve noticed this time around,” he said, “is that once you get by the AI resume screen, your first contact is almost always not a technical interview, or even a standard interview. It’s just a vibe check.”

In fact, that’s exactly what he was told by the first junior HR rep he met with: “This isn’t, like, a high-stress interview, it’s just a vibe check.”

He hadn’t heard that term before. Ever. 

But then he heard it again, not long after, in another initial screening.

And so he checked with some of the folks in a peer group with whom he’s sharing the recruiting and job search process and tips and war stories—and by the way, having a group like this is crucial when you’re looking for a job—and they’d heard it too. Not all of them, but more than one of them said the vibe check was their first touch. And it wasn’t always called a vibe check either, it was a “fit check” in one, a “personality profile” in another, and an old-fashioned “get-to-know-ya” in a third.

Oddly enough, I’m all for this kind of thing. But, you know, last. Not first.

Producing the Stack

I checked in with an HR pro I respect and she did something between a sigh and a laugh. 

“Well, I suppose they have to have something for these kids to do, now that they’re using AI to do everything else. The problem is when these folks decide that they’re the self-appointed judge and jury of company culture – and maybe management isn’t even aware this is going on. It’s not something they’ll declare. They just produce a ‘stack of assholes’ for every open position and hide it away and nobody ever sees it. Then management gets to interview the leftovers.”

By the way, “stack of assholes” is my new favorite phrase. Apologies to my editor.

“The vibe check is legit,” she added. “But I still call it cultural fit. Because it shouldn’t be about vibes or anything that vague. That’s problematic for a number of reasons. And it should be used only to weed out extreme outliers – when the candidate checks all the boxes but you are nearly sure this person would fail in your environment. And it should only be judged by someone who has a hand in shaping the culture. And it should be at the end of the process, not a gate.”

Ah, I got one thing right. 

“I don’t …,” she drifted off a bit. “I don’t like this.”

When Hiring Is Just Swiping Right

Or is it left? I’ve been married for a while.

Again, I don’t know this guy that well, friend of a friend, but I matched his resume to the job description and it was perfect. And in 15 minutes with him and another 10 minutes “vibe checking” the company from their website, I didn’t see any red flags.

So I asked what he thought went wrong.

“I think I used ‘I’ too much,” he said. “It was a fast 30 minutes with someone who [admittedly] wasn’t technical, so I did a lot of talking, trying to get everything in and explain it at the same time, and maybe that came off like bragging.”

This reminded me of a story I had just heard a month ago, when a friend of mine brought solutions to the interview instead of platitudes. 

And techies are like this because we’re in tech. We get so overlooked and get so little credit for our individual efforts that we can’t wait to actually talk about what we’ve done to someone who is listening. 

The problem arises when they aren’t listening, and just playing the game from a different checklist of buzzwords. Maybe it isn’t even a case of your bad vibes, but a case of not spending enough time talking about your good ones. 

Great. We gotta do that now too?

Fit Check Good, Vibe Check Bad

Here’s what I think is going on, and it’s a bigger issue than shoving a recent grad between the resumes and the initial round of interviews. 

Company culture is real and it’s a good thing to maintain. That’s not the issue. I don’t believe culture is the problem. I believe an increasingly wider gap in culture is the real problem.

Back in my day, the first screen for a tech candidate was with the head of tech or the head of the project/product. I know circumstances have converged to make this next to impossible, so I may not have a prescription here. 

But I do know that the more we push tech people away from the end result and the goals of the company, whether that’s through agile-devolving-into-waterfall release schedules or a series of best-intention hiring gates that result in unintended consequences, the wider the disconnect becomes between those company goals and the final product that must be the conduit to achieve them.

When you lean too far into vibe to hire employees, you’re forced to depend on vibe to produce their output, and then rely on vibe to sell that output to the customer.

Business leaders have a choice to make. If you have any input please get in touch.