The Champion and the Veto

The simple way to run post-interview decision-making with minimal process.

If you’ve ever been on a panel of interviewers, you know that the process for making the hiring decision can be very different, hire to hire, and often inconsistent. This is not by design, it’s by nature.

Sure, there might be a process defined in your tracking system for giving scores on various attributes etc, but in reality most interviewers will manipulate their scores to reflect the outcome they want. The “pow-wow” is where the decision *really* gets made.

Here are the HUGE mistakes I normally observe in various companies’ hiring process which often result in bad hires.

1. The “Innocent until proven guilty” or “Default Yes”

Every interviewer is ambivalent about the candidate — they all think the candidate is “not bad”, and they end up moving forward because well, they couldn’t find anything so bad during the interview that would merit rejection.

This is one of the most insidious kinds of problems when it comes to talent acquisition, culture, and keeping the quality bar high. It also creates a very negative interviewing mindset of “I’m going to keep asking questions with the expectation to be disappointed, and if I’m not disappointed by the end I guess the candidate is good enough”. This negative mindset hurts your candidate experience.

Over time you end up making a bunch of hires that everyone is ambivalent about, which leads to culture erosion, because people care less about the outcome of the new hire.

2. Conflict Avoidance

If your boss thinks the candidate is great and really wants to hire them and makes that clear, you’d have to feel pretty strongly about not hiring them in order to say something. Do you want to save your disagreement bullets for another fight or use them here? Eh.

Alternatively, there might be someone on your team who’s opinion is generally more valued by the top brass, who either thinks the candidate is good or bad. Do you really want to pick a fight with them over this?

In a perfect world you’d have the perfect team where everyone’s opinions are counted equally and disagreements are always welcomed, but no place is perfect so your decisions can’t be based on an idealistic view of the team, in most companies.

3. Voting

Doesn’t it seem like a great idea when each interviewer gets one vote and majority wins? Sounds simple, clear, and designed to make all the interviewers happy — yay democracy!

In reality this isn’t a great way to make hiring decisions — because you’ll end up hiring all the “moderates”. This can be stagnating for your culture, and also give way to more office politics. You might end up with decisions

• where no one is excited about the new hire, which sets them up for failure.
• where toxicity and bias of the majority might self propagate (e.g if you only have 1 woman on the interviewing panel that votes No to a male candidate that she thinks is creepy, but all the other guys vote Yes)

None of these ideas are inherently bad, they’re good starting points but don’t actually optimize for the objective — hiring the best team possible. In fact, most of them optimize for keeping the interviewers happiest.

The best way to think about the “pow-wow” is to keep the objective front and center:

Design your process for hiring the best team possible, not making interviewers happy in the moment.

This is how I came up with the Champion Veto System (CVS). Here are the objectives of the system.

Champion Veto System (CVS) Objectives:

1. Minimize false positives (bad hires that we think are good)
2. Minimize false negatives (don’t miss out on great hires)
3. Maximize calculated risks (take more risks on people that might be great)
4. Fairness (fair to the candidate and the interviewer)

The system is very simple. Here are the rules of the Champion Veto system.

Champion Veto System (CVS) Rules:

• The default answer for a candidate is “No”.
• The only way to change a No to a Yes is for there to be at least one champion who is willing to fight for the candidate, who is so excited for the candidate, and would be willing to mentor them and ensure their success when they join.
• The only way to override a champion is with a Veto. Typically a Veto is only used if 1. there is a champion and 2. the vetoing person’s life would actually be worse at the company if they hired that candidate.
• If there are no champions or vetoes, the answer is No.

Do keep in mind that this is not reflective at all of how to conduct the actual interview, screening process, or other approach to candidate experience — just simply how to run the decision-making meeting.

What do you think? Have you experienced any of the pitfalls from voting or conflict avoidance or “default yes” cultures? Do you have other systems that you’d like to share? Post a reply or email me at vinayak@drafted.us.