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I Thought I Was a Decent Hiring Manager. Turns Out I Was Just Fast.

For a long time, I measured my success as a hiring manager by one thing:

how quickly I could close a role.

If interviews wrapped up fast, I felt efficient.
If offers went out smoothly, I felt competent.
If the ATS showed green checkmarks everywhere, I felt like I was doing my job right.

Interview rounds done.
Offer accepted.
Role closed.

That feeling lasts about three days.

Then the real work begins and that’s when hiring quality quietly shows up, whether you’re ready for it or not.


Speed Is Easy to Measure. Hiring Quality Isn’t.

This is something most recruitment technology never really prepares you for.

You don’t actually know if you made the right hire when you make it.

You hope you did.
You feel like you did.
You convince yourself you did.

But knowing comes later when deadlines tighten, priorities change and the work stops being theoretical.

Sometimes that certainty never shows up at all.

I’ve Hired People Who Interviewed Perfectly

Clear answers.
Strong communication.

Structured thinking.

At the end of those interviews, I’d often think:
“This person really gets it.”

What I really meant was:
“They sound like someone I’m comfortable saying yes to.”

That’s not insight.
That’s familiarity.

And familiarity is a surprisingly weak signal when it comes to predicting real performance.

Resumes Don’t Reveal How People Actually Work

Resumes are good storytellers.
Everyone has “led initiatives.”

Everyone has “driven impact.”
Everyone claims experience with ambiguity.

No resume ever says:

struggles when priorities change
needs constant clarity to function
freezes when the problem isn’t well defined
    

So like most hiring managers, I filled in the gaps myself.

That’s how hiring mistakes usually happen — not because we’re careless, but because we assume instead of verify.

Interviews Test Comfort, Not Execution

I don’t think interviews are useless.

I just think we expect them to do a job they were never meant to do.

We treat conversations like evidence.
They’re not.
They’re performances.

Some people are excellent performers in interviews — articulate, confident, composed and then struggle once real constraints and messy realities show up.

This is where the tension between hiring quality and speed actually lives.

Interviews help you decide quickly.
They rarely help you decide accurately.

Recruitment Technology Helped Me Move Faster — Not Decide Better

The tools I used were great at logistics:
Scheduling interviews, managing pipelines, screening at scale..

They made hiring feel controlled.

But when it came time to decide, it was still just me, a few interview notes, and a sentence I’ve learned to distrust:

“Honestly… they seem fine.”

That sentence has quietly caused more bad hires than most teams want to admit.

I Didn’t Need More Speed. I Needed Fewer Unknowns.

At some point, it became obvious.

I wasn’t hiring badly.
I was hiring with incomplete evidence.

I didn’t want more candidates moving through a funnel.
I wanted fewer surprises after someone joined.

That realization is what led to ThinkHumble.

Not as another hiring tool.
But as a way to fix the part of hiring everyone struggles with quietly: decision confidence.

What Changed When I Started Seeing Real Work

ThinkHumble didn’t come in promising speed.

Which was refreshing because speed was never what I was missing.

What it did instead was remove ambiguity.

I could finally see how candidates actually worked:

â—Ź how they approached real tasks
â—Ź how they handled ambiguity
â—Ź how they thought under pressure
â—Ź how they executed when instructions weren’t perfect

Not hypotheticals.

Not stories from past jobs.
Actual work, before commitment.

Some candidates I liked suddenly raised questions.
Others I wasn’t sure about quietly stood out.

That moment was uncomfortable.

It was also the most honest hiring signal I’d ever had.

The Decision Felt… Calm

No debates.
No gut-check speeches.
No post-interview overanalysis.

Just a quiet sense of:
This makes sense.

When the person joined, something unusual happened.

I didn’t wait for the other shoe to drop.

That’s when I realized how much energy guessing had been consuming.

Speed Without Quality Is Just Delayed Regret

I still care about hiring efficiently.

But I care far more about not reopening the same role six months later and explaining why the last hire “wasn’t quite the right fit.”

Hiring fast is easy.
Rehiring is exhausting.

Most tech hiring solutions help you move candidates through a system.

ThinkHumble helps hiring managers understand people before committing to them and when that clarity exists, speed follows naturally.

Not rushed speed.
Not forced speed.

Just decisions that don’t need defending later.

If you’re curious what it feels like to hire without guessing, this is exactly why ThinkHumble exists.



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