Many years ago at a company somewhere, I was forming a new engineering team - recruiting is job 1 at this point and time. We had a new-ish grad come in and inte

Many years ago at a company somewhere, I was forming a new engineering team - recruiting is job 1 at this point and time. We had a new-ish grad come in and interview. I conducted a behavioral interview with questions that were pre-determined. I thought their answers were pretty bad and felt the 1 hour interview didn't tell me much of what I was looking for. I ended up scoring them pretty low and being over-ridden by my manager as they liked this person. Turned out that this person got hired and became one of the folks on the team I most liked, respected and got along with. At the same time, their work output had high quality and they were driven. Lesson: you can't have a confidence of 100% from a 1 hour interview (negative or positive) My solution is now to have a characterize their performance using a confidence interval. It makes choosing the score much harder, but results in really thinking about grading the candidate in a clearer way.