Most hiring playbooks were written for roles where a good generalist can evaluate a good candidate. They break the moment the role requires depth the interviewer does not have. These are the failures we see most often, and what evidence-based screening does about each.
1. Using a generalist to judge a specialist
A recruiter who cannot tell a strong answer from a fluent one will, in good faith, hire the fluent one. This is not a competence problem; it is a structural one. The evaluation has to be done by someone, or something, that understands the field.
Our rubrics are written by domain experts and every interview is scored against them. The person reading the scorecard does not need to be a specialist, because the specialist's judgement is already in the criteria.
2. Screening on keywords
The deepest people in a field rarely optimise their résumé. They are busy doing the work. Keyword filters reward the candidates who studied the job posting, not the ones who could do the job.
Résumé screening should weigh evidence of depth against the actual brief: what was built, what was published, what the candidate was responsible for, and how recently. Parsing is easy. Ranking is the part that matters.
3. Letting the interview loop drift
Four interviewers, four sets of questions, four private impressions, and a debrief where the loudest voice wins. Nobody in that room has comparable evidence, so the decision comes down to who argued best.
One rubric, one set of core questions, one scoring scale. The debate can then be about the candidate rather than about the process.
4. Mistaking confidence for competence
Specialist work is full of people who are quietly excellent and less full of people who are loudly so. Interviews that reward performance will systematically miss the former.
Structured questions that ask for reasoning, and scoring that looks for evidence rather than delivery, correct for this. So does removing the phone screen, which was mostly a test of delivery.
5. Taking six weeks
Specialists have options. A process that takes six weeks from application to offer will lose the strongest candidates somewhere around week three, usually without telling you why.
The screening stage does not need to take that long. With the interview available on demand and scoring automated, a ranked shortlist in forty-eight hours is a normal outcome rather than a heroic one. The time you save is spent where it counts: talking to the finalists.