We have helped thousands of investors, founders, executives, and hiring managers avoid costly hiring mistakes by becoming more effective interviewers. Some of our strategies are relatively straightforward. But some of them are hugely counterintuitive.

One of the biggest jaw-dropping principles behind great interviewing involves what not to do when interviewing a candidate. And it may seem to defy logic.

Stop judging the candidate.

Truly!

When you are “in the room” (or “on the Zoom”) with the candidate, you should not be wasting any mental bandwidth deciding whether or not you want to hire this person. 

Wait. Isn’t that the whole purpose of an interviewing process, to decide whether the candidate is a strong fit?

Of course. But the time to do that is after the interview, once all of the data (from you and your colleagues) is in. When you are actually engaged in the interview itself, you should be focused on building rapport with the candidate, asking the right questions, and capturing the data.

When you start judging candidates in real time, several bad things happen:

1. You will form an early hypothesis and spend the rest of the interview seeking to confirm it. It will bias what you ask — and how you ask it — from that point forward.
2. You will miss things. You will seek out and inflate the data points that align with your real-time judgments and discount the data that conflicts with it.
3. Candidates will be less forthcoming. Even if you are judging them positively, candidates will know your inner judge is switched on. Your “tells” will remind them to curate their stories carefully.
4. You will put your DEI hiring initiatives at risk. You will invariably pass more favorable real-time judgments on candidates who are like you or who share elements of your background.

Removing this inclination to judge a candidate in real time is hard work. It takes a lot of discipline and practice.

Our advice? 

Channel that “judgment impulse” in a different direction. Rather than judging the candidate, judge the dialogue itself. “Are we talking about something that is relevant to the role in question?” Basically, “Are we using time wisely?”

If you keep your inner judge focused on time management rather than “pass/fail,” you will find that you get more data, better data, less bias, happier candidates, and higher quality hires.

This post was originally published on LinkedIn.