“It Just Didn’t Feel Right”: The Truth About Gut Instinct in Interviews
She rang me on the Tuesday afternoon, about twenty minutes after leaving the building. Great role. Great salary. A 2 min commute. Everything she’d told me she wanted, right there on a plate.
“I don’t know how to explain it, Lyndsey. It just didn’t feel right.”
I asked her what specifically. She couldn’t really tell me. She just knew.
Last month, I was working on a senior role and I was certain the client would love the candidate I had presented. Strong background, exactly the right experience, ticked EVERY box on the spec.
“He’s very good on paper. But there was just no spark. We didn’t gel.”
Twenty years in and I still have this conversation most weeks, from both sides of the table. Nobody can explain it. Everybody trusts it completely.
So let’s actually talk about it. Because gut feel in interviews is real, it is powerful, and it is right far less often than any of us would like to admit.
What “Gut Feel” Actually Is
Here’s the uncomfortable bit. That instinct isn’t mystical. It’s your brain doing two things at once, and only one of them is useful.
The first is pattern recognition. You have picked up on something real, something observable, but your conscious brain hasn’t caught up enough to put words to it yet. That’s genuine information and it’s worth listening to.
The second is bias. Familiarity dressed up as judgement. You liked them because they reminded you of you, or of the last person who did the job well, or of someone you get on with. Or you didn’t like them because something about them felt unfamiliar, and unfamiliar registers as risk.
The problem is that both of those arrive in exactly the same way. As a feeling. With no label on it telling you which one you’ve just had.
Candidates: Your Gut Is Usually Picking Up Something Real
When a candidate tells me an interview didn’t feel right, I’ve learned to slow the conversation down and ask better questions. And nine times out of ten, when we dig, there was something concrete there all along.
The manager checked his phone twice. Nobody in the office looked up when you walked through. The interviewer hadn’t read your CV and made no attempt to hide it. The office felt too quiet, too loud or cramped. You asked why the role was vacant and the room went quiet. Two people gave you completely different accounts of what the job actually involves.
None of those things feel like evidence in the moment. Together they’re a very clear picture.
I worked with a candidate last year who turned down an offer on instinct alone. She couldn’t articulate it beyond “something was off.” She took a role on less money further from home but it felt right. She still works there and is very happy!
Your gut is often just observation arriving before language does. So interrogate it. Write down three things you noticed. If you can name them, they’re data. If you genuinely can’t name anything at all, then it might just be nerves, or a bad journey, or the fact you’d rather have been anywhere else that morning.
Employers: Your Gut Is the Expensive One
This is where I have to be blunt, and it’s the part of this post that will land least comfortably.
When a candidate follows their gut, they walk away from one job. When an employer follows theirs, they make a hiring decision that affects a team, a budget, and someone’s livelihood, and they usually do it without writing down a single reason why.
The research on this is not ambiguous. The most recent large-scale analysis of what actually predicts job performance puts structured interviews with standardised questions and systematic scoring well ahead of free-flowing, unstructured conversations, at 0.42 against 0.19. The same work found structured interviews carry meaningfully less bias too. Roughly twice as good at telling you who can do the job. And yet the unstructured chat remains the default in most SMEs, because it feels natural and because we all quietly believe we’re good judges of people. (Sackett et al., 2022, the most recent meta-analysis of selection methods).
The CIPD are equally direct on the “we just didn’t gel” problem. Requirements around cultural fit are subjective and increase bias in hiring decisions. Fit is almost always described in terms of shared values, but in practice it usually means shared background, shared humour, shared way of communicating.
And there is a legal edge to this that a lot of smaller employers don’t see coming. If a rejected candidate brings a discrimination claim, a decision recorded as “no spark” is not a defence. It’s a gap where your reasoning should be. Subjective, undocumented decisions are the hardest ones to stand behind.
The Ones Who Didn’t Gel
I placed a candidate two years ago who very nearly didn’t get a second interview. The MD’s feedback after round one was that he was “a bit quiet” and he “couldn’t see him fitting in with the team.” I pushed back, mostly because I’d met him twice and knew he was quietly brilliant and openly terrible at small talk. Once in his role he came alive and his references reflected that. I knew his current boss and had first hand knowledge of his experience.
He’s now running the Sales and Customer Services department.
I’ve also seen the opposite plenty of times. The candidate everyone loved on the day. Warm, funny, easy company, instant rapport. Hired in a fortnight because it felt so obviously right. Gone within six months, because likeable in a room for an hour and capable in a role for three years are not the same thing, and nobody had thought to check the second one.
Gut feel is very good at telling you whether you’d enjoy having a coffee with someone. It is not very good at telling you whether they can do the job.
So What Do You Actually Do With It?
Don’t ignore it. Just make it earn its place.
If you’re an employer, score the role requirements first and feel second. Ask the same questions of every candidate. Take notes as you go, not afterwards. And when someone on your panel says they didn’t gel, ask them what specifically, and keep asking until you get a behaviour rather than a vibe. If there’s a real answer, it’ll surface. If there isn’t, you’ve just caught a bias before it cost you a good hire.
If you’re a candidate, give the feeling a name before you act on it. Three things you noticed. If you can list them, trust yourself. If you can’t, sleep on it and ask for a second conversation, or a chat with someone who’d be in your team. A good employer will say yes without hesitating.
And for what it’s worth, I have gut feel too. Many years of it. It’s sharper than it was, but it isn’t infallible, and I’ve been wrong about people in both directions. What I’ve learned is that the instinct is worth listening to as a question, not as an answer.
It’s the start of the thinking. Never the end of it.
Until next Sunday!
Lyndsey
P.S. Looking for a new role? Head over to our jobs page and take a look, you never know what you might find!
