Over the past year at Forté, I’ve been paying close attention to how employers talk after meeting candidates at events and programs. These are not interviews. They are short conversations. Coffee chats. Roundtables. The kinds of interactions everyone treats as informational but that still shape impressions.
The reactions are often muted. No one says a candidate did poorly. In fact, the opposite is usually true.
- The candidate was capable.
- The conversation was pleasant.
- “I enjoyed meeting them.”
What’s missing is strong enthusiasm, which is understandable. Most professionals are not trying to hire a new best friend. They are trying to make a careful decision between several good options.
Why the reaction feels familiar
Lately, that reaction has been reminding me of a leadership book I loved years ago, Robert Sutton’s Weird Ideas That Work: 11 1/2 Practices for Promoting, Managing, and Sustaining Innovation.
One idea in particular always stayed with me. Idea number 1 1/2: hire people who make you uncomfortable.
Sutton was not talking about poor candidates or difficult personalities. He was describing a very human instinct in organizations. We tend to trust people we quickly understand. When someone communicates in familiar ways, we feel confident in them faster. Familiarity often gets interpreted as competence, while harder-to-interpret interactions make confidence slower to form.
His point was about innovation. If teams only hire the people who feel easiest to agree with, they gradually end up with multiple versions of themselves and then wonder why new ideas are rare.
If teams only hire the people who feel easiest to agree with, they gradually end up with multiple versions of themselves and then wonder why new ideas are rare."
Why quick conversations feel decisive
That same instinct shows up not just in team dynamics, but in how candidates are evaluated.
In brief recruiting interactions, employers are not conducting a full assessment; they are forming confidence. Sometimes the conversation gives them a clear sense of the person. Sometimes it doesn’t.
Hiring decisions still have to be made, so the uncertainty gets expressed indirectly.
That is the moment behind a familiar piece of feedback: “I just wasn’t sure.”
The phrase rarely means the candidate performed poorly. It usually means the interaction didn’t provide enough clarity to confidently move forward.
At first glance, this sounds like a readiness question. Employers do need people who can communicate well, represent the organization, and work effectively with clients and teams.
But early recruiting conversations are brief. Selection rarely happens after a single meeting. Instead, candidates are compared, and recruiters move forward with the people they feel most certain about.
This helps explain a pattern many organizations recognize: they meet capable candidates and still hesitate about whom to advance. The hesitation is not lack of interest. It is lack of certainty.
Why more interaction changes decisions
The recruiting practices that consistently help are the ones that provide more than a single interaction. Ongoing engagement, relationship building, visibility to leaders, and structured follow-ups give employers time to build real confidence in candidates rather than relying on first impressions.
Most recruiting teams already sense this. They leave events with several strong candidates but struggle to confidently distinguish among them. The question is not whether the candidates are capable. It is whether the interaction produced enough clarity to support a decision.
Our Best Practices in Recruiting Women guide focuses on this practical challenge. It offers ways to structure recruiting interactions so employers have more opportunities to learn about candidates before making decisions. The goal is not simply broader outreach. It is clearer confidence.
If your team has ever left an event thinking, “we met impressive people, but we still aren’t sure who to advance,” this guide was designed for exactly that moment.
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