Why a Coin Flip Is a Better Hiring Manager Than You

Your Gut Feeling is Sabotaging Your Company.

Let’s be honest. Your last bad hire is still haunting you. The one who interviewed like a rockstar but performed like a rock. The one that cost you thousands in salary, training, and team morale before you finally ripped off the band-aid.

You told yourself it was a fluke.

It wasn’t. It was your process. More specifically, it was your gut. You thought you had a “good feeling,” but your intuition lied to you.

We all think we’re brilliant judges of character. But the data says most of us are laughably bad at it. Just look at this brutal chart from Google’s former HR chief, Laszlo Bock. It shows how accurate interviewers are at predicting if a candidate will be a good hire.

• The Newbies (< 50 interviews): Look at that mess on the left. A huge number of them are less than 50% accurate. A coin flip would be a better hiring manager. They aren’t just learning; they’re actively torpedoing your talent pool.
• The Vets (150+ interviews): On the right, accuracy shoots up to over 70%. Experience matters. A lot.

Unless you’re that one dot at the top—a certified hiring psychic named Nelson Abramson—you are playing Russian roulette with your company’s most important asset: its people. (And Nelson only interviewed a very specific technical specialty for an incredibly rare role, so you’re not Nelson.)

The Fix Isn’t Magic. It’s Math.

So, how do you fix it without sending your managers to a 10-year interviewing bootcamp?

You stop trusting any single person’s gut. Including your own.

Google figured out a simple, almost insulting, hack. They called it the “wisdom of crowds.” By taking the average score from just four interviewers, their predictive accuracy rocketed to 86%.

Why? Because it smooths out all the human nonsense.

It cancels out the interviewer who’s having a bad day. It neutralizes the bias of the one wowed by a fancy diploma. It averages out the crazy and leaves you with something shockingly close to the truth. It stops one person from being able to “blackball any candidate.”

The No-Excuses Playbook for Hiring Smarter

You don’t need Google’s budget. You just need to kill your ego and follow the rules.

1. Stop Flying Solo. The Lone Wolf hiring manager is a myth. And a costly one. Mandate a team approach. Three to four interviewers, minimum.
2. Build a Real Jury. Don’t just grab three people from the same team. Mix it up. Get a peer who knows the daily grind. Get someone from a totally different department to be an objective “quality check” (Google calls them a cross-functional interviewer). Hell, Google has subordinates interview their potential bosses—it’s a genius power move that filters out jerks.
3. Score It. Don’t “Vibe” It. “Good vibes” don’t ship product. Create a simple scorecard for the key skills and traits you need. Make every interviewer put a number down and write a sentence explaining why. No more vague feelings. Just cold, hard data.
4. The Average is Your New Boss. This is the one that really hurts. The hiring manager’s opinion is just one data point. It is not a veto. If the manager loves a candidate but the average score is a “no,” the answer is NO. The average wins. Period.

Stop making excuses. Stop hiring on a feeling. The future of your company depends on the people you bring in. It’s time to start acting like it.

If you are looking for a Hiring OS solution based on the best academic research, reach out to see how I can help.