Do candidates who seem boring or unremarkable in interviews often turn out to be excellent hires?
5 recorded positions from 3 people, first said Jul 17, 2023. They do not agree — the readings below are what each one actually argued.
Boring in interview correlates with being a great hire
Harry Stebbings · Jul 17, 2023
The speaker's own best hires were the candidates who came across as the most boring during the interview process, though they turned out not to be boring and to be brilliant
Scope: his own anecdotal pattern
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Harry Stebbings · Aug 28, 2023
Hire for boring and capable, because boring people are rarely arrogant and candidates always turn out more fun than they seem in interviews
People present their most boring self in an interview process, and boringness correlates with lack of arrogance
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Harry Stebbings · Mar 21, 2025
People who come across as boring in interviews tend to make the best hires.
They are never as boring in the job as they appear in an interview process.
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Also on the record
Elias Torres · Mar 21, 2025
The founder should make the final hiring decision themselves regardless of what the interview panel recommends.
Panels have repeatedly rejected quiet, shy candidates with grit who turned out better than the people the panel preferred, and later admitted it.
36:14 Panels systematically reject quiet candidates so founder must override them
Aravind Srinivas · Jun 5, 2024
People who hit the ground running immediately are not necessarily the best hires — given enough time, people with different styles truly transform themselves
He has watched people who did not start fast go on to transform, which corrected his earlier attitude
45:50 Slow starting hires can still transform into top performers given enough time
Your assistant can query this graph directly — 5 positions here, 19,646 across the corpus. Add 996.fm over MCP.