Report Finds Glaring Difference In Feedback Job Interviewers Give About Men Vs. Women

New data from Textio finds that interviewers continue to hire for personality vibes (like "bubbly" women) over relevant skills.

A new report is revealing what many frustrated job seekers have long suspected: It’s not what you know, but what your interviewers think about your personality that can get you the job.

In a Textio report published Tuesday, job candidates who received offers were significantly more likely to be described as having a “great personality” than those who didn’t get offers — and for men and women, that often meant wildly different things. To figure this out, Textio, a talent optimization platform commonly used by human resources professionals, analyzed 10,377 internal job interview assessments done by hiring managers and recruiters across more than 3,900 job candidates, mostly in North America.

What Textio found was that hiring teams for corporate roles, including marketing, legal, engineering and sales, were being swayed by a job candidate’s vibes. Shortly after job interviews, hiring managers used Textio’s platform to document internal feedback about a job candidate, and the type of feedback they were more likely to share was about a job candidate’s charm, “great energy” and “friendly” personality ― not their relevant skills. Ultimately, managers were more likely to hire people they liked.

Kieran Snyder, Textio co-founder and chief scientist emeritus, said the finding “shows that our bias begins before the person’s even hired. So candidates coming in, you see this real gendered impact of the way that they’re described.”

All vibes-hiring is bad. But gendered personality feedback can leave lasting impressions.