The confident candidate problem

Confidence is not always competence

If you look back at your last few hiring decisions, there is usually a pattern. The candidates who progress are the ones who feel easy to assess. You have a good chat with them, it feels comfortable, they inspire confidence through their own confidence.

That confidence creates a kind of halo effect. It makes everything else they say feel more credible. Even when the answer is slightly off, the delivery carries it.

Meanwhile, a candidate who pauses, who asks for a moment to think, or who talks through a problem in a less structured way can feel uncertain. Even if what they are actually doing is working through the problem properly.

This is where things start to go wrong because in most engineering roles, the job is not to produce instant, polished answers under pressure. The job is to solve messy problems, often with incomplete information, where the best approach is not obvious. The job rewards people who slow down, question assumptions, and think things through.

But your interview process is often rewarding the opposite.

The engineers you are missing

Some of the strongest engineers do not interview well. Not because they lack ability, but because they’re less good at putting on a show during interviews.

They will pause before answering because they are considering edge cases. They will ask clarifying questions because they want to understand the problem properly. They might go down a path, realise it is not quite right, and adjust. From the outside, it can look messy. It can feel less confident.

In reality, it is often exactly how good engineering work happens.

The problem is that this kind of thinking does not always translate well into a 45 minute interview slot. Especially when the format is stacked against it. Rapid-fire questions, multiple interviewers, pressure to respond quickly. The importance of solving the problem at hand drifts away.

Meanwhile, someone who delivers a smooth, well-rehearsed answer gets a pass, even if they have not really engaged with the complexity of the problem.

It is not that hiring managers are making bad decisions on purpose. It is that the process is nudging them toward a very specific type of person.

The bias toward polish

There is also a social element to this that is hard to ignore. People naturally gravitate toward others who are easy to communicate with. If you have to ask follow-up questions or rephrase your question, it takes you out of the moment and you feel a little awkwards. It doesn’t help that most people do not have training in how to conduct interviews. (Interviewing is a skill too!) If you’re conducting interviews that you wish you weren’t doing (you’re busy! You have your own work to do!), and you’re speaking to someone that’s easy to talk to, it can feel like the right answer. This person seems cool! Let’s hire them, job done.

But it is worth asking what is actually being measured. In many cases, it is not depth of thinking or technical judgment. It is how comfortable the interaction felt.

This creates a quiet bias toward polished communicators. People who have practised interviewing, who know how to structure answers, who can guide a conversation. Again, none of these are bad traits.

Because this kind of process does not just favour “confident people” in a vague sense. It systematically advantages certain groups and filters out others.

• It favours native speakers over people working in a second language, where fluency and speed are naturally different.
• It favours people who are neurotypical over those who may need more time to process or who communicate in less conventional ways.
• It often favours men over women, because confidence is socially conditioned and perceived differently depending on who is displaying it. I’m sure many women reading this have been told they come off as aggressive for displaying the same traits as a “confident” man.

Hopefully, none of this is intentional. If you are sitting there thinking “aha, I’m so biased, I’m going to hire the straightest, whitest, most confident man I can find”, then this blog isn’t going to save you. (although, I do recommend therapy)

So when companies say they want diverse teams, but still run interview processes that reward speed, polish, and immediate confidence, there is a disconnect. The process itself is doing the filtering. One of the best engineers I know would like to leave their job but they are kinda shy and go to pieces in an interview situation. Amazing at their job, garbage at interviews so no one gets to hire them.

What this costs you

The impact of this is not always obvious in the moment. You still make hires. The team still functions. You end up with a team that communicates in similar ways and approaches problems from similar angles. You get consistency, which feels good, but you lose diversity of thought. Blind spots stay hidden because no one is coming at the problem differently.

At the same time, the candidates who might have challenged those assumptions, the ones who think more deeply or differently, are filtered out early. Not because they could not do the job, but because they did not perform in the expected way during the interview.

All these lovely engineers stay in a job that they don’t like, or they go to a company that has a more forgiving interview process.

The interview as performance

A lot of this comes down to one uncomfortable truth. Most interviews are a performance.

There is a script, even if it is unspoken. The candidate is expected to respond quickly, structure their thoughts neatly, and demonstrate competence in a way that is easy to consume. The interviewer is looking for signals they can recognise and compare.

If your process is built around performance, you will get performers. People who know how to play the game, who can present themselves in the right way, who understand what “good” looks like in that context.

So how do you actually fix it?

This is the part most companies skip. They agree with all of the above, then run the exact same interview loop next week.

Right now, silence in an interview feels awkward, so interviewers rush to fill it or move on. That pushes candidates to respond quickly rather than thoughtfully. If you instead make it explicit that taking a minute is fine, you will get very different answers.

The same applies to how you ask questions. If your process is built around rapid-fire prompts or generic “tell me about a time” questions, you are testing memory and storytelling. Not how someone actually works. Replace some of that with real problems. Not puzzles, not trick questions, but situations your team genuinely deals with.

What you are looking for is not a perfect answer. It is how they approach it. Do they clarify the problem? Do they consider trade-offs? Do they adjust when something does not work? Do they ask follow-up questions or do they call out assumptions. This can be a nice way also to see if the candidate has done a little research on your company. If they reference anything specific about your setup or product, that’s a nice indicator that they care about your company in particular.

You also need to get much clearer internally on what you are evaluating. A lot of feedback after interviews is vague. “Good communicator.” “A bit unsure.” “Not quite senior.” Those are impressions, not assessments. If you do not define what good looks like, you will default to what feels good. Alignment across interviewers matters more than most teams think. If one person values depth and another values delivery, your hiring decision becomes a coin toss. You need shared criteria, and you need to stick to them.

And if you are serious about building more inclusive teams, this is where the work actually happens. Not in statements or branding, but in how you design and run your interviews. Slowing things down, allowing different communication styles, and focusing on thinking over performance will not just improve fairness. It will improve hiring outcomes.

Finally, and this is the uncomfortable bit, you need to separate likeability from capability. The candidate who feels easiest to talk to is not automatically the best hire. Sometimes they are. Sometimes they are just easier to evaluate. Putting the time into building out a solid rubric will pay off in excellent engineers who will make your team stronger, not just larger.

The lost candidate

Somewhere in your current pipeline, or in your recent rejections, there is a candidate. Someone who did not immediately impress, who took a bit longer to answer, who maybe felt less polished. They might also be the person who, given the space, would have broken down your hardest problems more effectively than anyone else you spoke to. Let’s not miss them the next time!

If you want to chat to a real live person about your hiring process, get in touch with us here at nineDots. We’ve helped companies all over the world hire for everything in tech so we can help you to build out a process that gets you the person you need, not just the shiniest engineer. I’m not saying to hire the monosyllabic person where you have to drag every answer out of them, I’m saying to allow for all personality types in your interview process.

Further reading:

• https://rework.withgoogle.com/intl/en/guides/hiring-use-structured-interviewing
• https://vidcruiter.com/interview/structured/interview-rubric
• https://circleci.com/blog/how-we-interview-engineers-at-circleci/
• https://f1000research.com/articles/14-1381
• https://www.dover.com/blog/why-startup-founders-should-create-hiring-rubrics
• https://juicebox.ai/blog/rubrics-for-interviews