Ok, I can buy that - your point is that you should be attempting to get an unbiased estimate of how well someone works on a team, not that it shouldn't matter.

Ok, I can buy that - your point is that you should be attempting to get an unbiased estimate of how well someone works on a team, not that it shouldn't matter. Totally reasonable. Much more difficult, but a worthwhile goal. I feel like it might be almost impossible to remove gut feeling from the equation alogether, though, since a lot of the problems that wreck teams really do come down to "X really doesn't like Y's personality". At some level, isn't a negative gut feeling expressed by one of your team members as valid a data point as you can get to predict how well the person will work out on that team?