What decisions get made in the first five minutes of an interview

I don't love the word "judgement." It sounds harsher than what's actually happening. But if I'm honest, that's exactly what it is. From the moment I meet a candidate, I'm forming an impression, and so is every hiring manager sitting across the table.

It's not based on the resume alone, and it's not made in the first 30 seconds either, whatever people like to claim. It builds over the phone screen, the arrival, the handshake, the small talk before anyone's asked a real question. How someone presents. Whether they're nice to the person on reception. How firm their handshake is, whether they hold eye contact, whether they seem comfortable in the room or like they'd rather be anywhere else.

None of these things are deal breakers on their own. Except rudeness to people. That one might be.

Nerves are normal. Not being prepared is a choice.

I've sat across from candidates who were visibly nervous, fumbling their words, taking a second too long to answer. That's not a red flag to me. Interviews are an unnatural situation. You're sitting in a room with a stranger, talking about yourself, with a lot riding on how well you do it. Of course people get nervous.

What I do notice is preparation. Have they read the job ad. Do they know anything about the company. Are they asking questions, or just waiting for the interview to be over. That's a choice, not a nerve.

You never know which interviewer you're going to get

Here's the part that doesn't get talked about enough. Some interviewers will forgive nerves and a stumbled answer. Some won't. You have no way of knowing in advance which one you've got in front of you.

You might be their first interview of the day, fresh and switched on. Or their fifteenth, running on fumes. They might be having a great day, or a genuinely awful one, and whether they realise it or not, that can bleed into how the conversation goes. In some cases, the person interviewing you only has a surface-level understanding of the actual role. Which means you're not being assessed on your technical knowledge at all. You're being assessed on what they can see and hear in front of them.

And the same is true in reverse. You might be having a rough morning. Uncomfortable in the outfit you picked. Still not sure the role is even right for you. It is genuinely rare that everyone in the room is feeling their best at the same time.

So what does that mean for how I assess people

I do make an assessment. I do make a call, and I make it reasonably quickly. But not off one interaction, and not off the resume in isolation. I'm watching how someone settles into the conversation, whether they can build a bit of rapport even when it's hard going, whether the nerves ease once we get into it.

I've backed candidates who interviewed poorly on paper but could clearly articulate why they wanted the role. One of those went on to become a genuinely great hire. I've also pushed a candidate forward once when the mismatches in front of me (LinkedIn, references, dates) should have told me not to. I was wrong that time.

The honest version of this is that hiring is not a level playing field, and to some extent it never has been. It's not always about qualifications or experience. Sometimes it comes down to circumstance: which interviewer you got, what kind of day they were having, whether the role was explained to them properly before you walked in.

You can't control most of that. What you can control is showing up prepared, being decent to everyone you meet on the way in, and giving yourself the best shot at settling into the conversation once you're in the room. The rest, more often than either side wants to admit, comes down to timing and circumstance as much as anything else.