"I've got a good feeling about this one." "They'd slot in well with the team." "I trust them."
These phrases come up regularly when it is time to choose a candidate. They seem natural. After all, hiring is above all a human decision. No dashboard can measure a person's curiosity, their ability to rally a team or their potential for growth.
Yet the trust placed in intuition raises questions.
In most companies, strategic decisions are now steered by data. A sales department tracks its conversion rate before adjusting its strategy. A marketing team analyses the return on investment of its campaigns before reallocating its budget. A finance department does not make an investment decision without relying on precise metrics.
Hiring stands out as the exception.
It remains one of the last strategic processes where decisions still rest largely on managers' experience, feelings or conviction. That intuition is not a weakness. It is even indispensable. The real problem arises when it is never tested against the facts.
According to Gartner, only 31% of hiring teams actually use labour market data to steer their strategy. Yet every hire already produces a significant amount of information: the time needed to fill a role, the channels that generate the best candidates, the best-performing recruitment firms, the offer acceptance rate and even how new hires are doing several months after they arrive.
In other words, companies already have some of the answers. They simply do not yet use them to their full potential.
For a hiring manager, the point is therefore not to choose between intuition and data. It is to make sure their intuition is enriched by what previous hires have already taught them.
Why intuition still dominates
If companies still largely hire on feel, it is not because they reject data. It is because intuition answers several very concrete realities.
First, it is immediate. A manager rarely hires full time. They still have to run their team, follow their projects, hit their targets and handle day-to-day emergencies. In that context, their experience naturally becomes their main decision-making tool. It lets them choose quickly between several candidates without having to analyse metrics they do not always have.
Second, hiring remains a deeply human decision. Choosing a team member is not just a matter of checking a list of skills. It also means assessing a personality, an ability to adapt, potential for progression or a way of working with others. Many managers fear that an overly analytical approach would make this essential dimension disappear.
Finally, companies rarely have the metrics that would genuinely inform their decisions. They generally know how many applications they receive or how long it takes to fill a role. They far more rarely know which recruitment firms get the best results, which channels generate the most lasting hires or which decisions taken during the process explain the success (or failure) of a hire several months later.
The problem is therefore not a lack of data.
The problem is that the data genuinely useful for decisions is still used too little.
Companies already produce the information they need
Every hire leaves behind a considerable amount of information.
Did the role stay open longer than planned? Which channels identified the candidates who were eventually hired? Did the chosen recruitment firm get better results than the others? Is the employee still there a year later? Would their manager make exactly the same choice today?
This information already exists in most organisations.
Yet it often stays scattered across an ATS, several Excel files, different HR tools or managers' meeting notes. It is mainly used to produce reports or to track the activity of the hiring team. Much more rarely to understand why some hires succeed lastingly while others fail.
For a long time, this was not seen as a problem. The goal was above all to fill a role. Once the contract was signed, the hire was considered finished. The question of whether that decision had actually been the right one was rarely asked in a structured way.
This is probably the greatest paradox of modern hiring: companies produce enormous amounts of data, yet they still learn relatively little from their own hires.
Data does not replace judgement. It lets you question it.
Pitting intuition against data is probably a reasoning error. The two do not pursue the same goal.
Intuition comes into play at the moment of decision. It lets a manager assess dimensions that no metric will ever be able to measure fully: the quality of a relationship, a candidate's ability to inspire trust, their potential for growth or how well they would suit the company's culture.
Data, by contrast, comes into play after the decision. It does not try to say which candidate to choose. It tries to understand whether the choices made actually deliver the expected results.
That is a fundamental difference.
When a company finds that a role consistently stays open longer than planned, that some recruitment firms get better results than others or that employees from a particular sourcing channel stay longer with the company, it is no longer assessing candidates. It is assessing how it hires.
This distinction profoundly changes how data is used. The aim is no longer to look for an algorithm that can replace human judgement. It is to identify the practices that lead, over time, to the best hires.
Why do some roles consistently overrun their planned timelines? Why does one recruitment firm do better on certain functions? Why does one manager regularly manage to hire people who perform and stay with the company, while others struggle more?
None of these questions is actually about the candidates.
They are about the decisions the company makes throughout the hiring process.
And this is precisely where data becomes a performance lever. It does not replace intuition. It makes it possible to check, with hindsight, whether that intuition actually leads to better hires.
The best-performing companies do not measure more. They learn more.
For a long time, hiring metrics were used essentially to produce dashboards.
Today, their role is changing.
They make it possible to identify what actually creates value.
If a recruitment firm consistently gets better results on certain functions, why not give it more missions? If a sourcing channel brings in employees who stay longer with the company, why keep investing as much in other, less effective channels? If an approval process consistently lengthens strategic hires, why not question it?
Data becomes useful when it no longer just measures what has happened. It becomes useful when it helps make better decisions.
The difference between a company that steers its hiring with data and one that does not therefore lies not in the number of KPIs it tracks.
It lies in its ability to turn every hire into a lesson, to question certain habits and to repeat what actually works.
Hiring with open eyes
Intuition will always have an essential place in hiring.
And that is a good thing.
Hiring a person will never be a simple equation.
But as hiring becomes more strategic, companies can no longer afford to base their decisions on feel alone.
They already learn from their sales, their investments and their marketing campaigns.
Perhaps it is time they learned from their hires with the same rigour.
Ultimately, they do not lack data.
What they lack is a culture of turning that data into better-informed decisions.
The organisations that make the difference tomorrow will not be those that hire without intuition.
They will be those that know how to enrich that intuition with the lessons of their past decisions.
FAQ
Why do companies still mainly hire on instinct?
Because hiring remains a deeply human decision. Managers have to assess qualities that are hard to pin down objectively, such as potential, personality or the ability to integrate into a team. The data available is still too rarely used to complement that expertise.
Which metrics actually help improve hiring?
Beyond average time to hire, companies benefit from tracking the quality of hires over time, the offer acceptance rate, the performance of recruitment firms, the effectiveness of sourcing channels and the retention of the people hired.
Does data replace a manager's experience?
No. It complements their judgement by providing an objective view of the practices that produce the best results and by limiting certain decision biases.
Why measure the performance of your hires?
Because a hire does not end with the signing of a contract. Measuring the results makes it possible to understand what actually works, to improve future decisions step by step and to make hiring a genuine performance lever.
