Here’s a sentence I don’t hear enough anymore: “I don’t know everything about this person, but I believe they’ll succeed here.”

That used to be how a hiring decision actually got made. Not instead of a real process, at the end of one. A manager ran the interviews, checked the references, did the work. And then they still had to make a call. Not because they had proof. Because they had judgment.

Somewhere along the way, we started treating the process as if it could replace that call. More rounds. A panel. A take-home project. Sometimes a presentation to five people who each weigh in separately. All useful, on their own. None of them a substitute for someone actually deciding.

That’s the part that’s gone wrong. Not the process itself, the assumption that enough of it eventually adds up to a decision. It doesn’t. It just delays one, and gives everyone in the room an easy way to avoid being the person who made the call.

I’ll say what I actually think, after twenty years of doing this: more process doesn’t mean more rigor if nobody’s actually using their judgment inside it. The real decision, whether this person is right for this job, still comes down to a person weighing what they saw and believing it enough to act. Skip that part, and you can run five rounds and still not have made a real decision.

I’m not saying skip the vetting. A senior hire deserves real scrutiny, and good process, real interviews, real reference checks, is how you get the material to make a good call. I’m saying the process is the input, not the decision. Confusing the two is why hiring has gotten slower without getting better.

Every good hire I’ve been part of had real process behind it. What made it work wasn’t the number of steps. It was someone at the center of it, willing to look at what they’d learned and say, I believe in this. Then act on it.