I’ve interviewed people before, but last month I went through my first proper round of CV screening. The role was for an analyst consultant in our Air Quality practice, the most junior full-time position in the company. What we wanted to see was enthusiasm for the role and for the company, a basic understanding of what we actually do, and above all not the sense that a candidate was just scatter-applying to anything online.

For this role, one of the key attributes we were looking for was numeracy skills, particularly coding. Coding can sound like a broad requirement, but as I’ve written before we are not software developers and we don’t want to be. We follow good practices and protocols, but we are not running sprints or getting caught up in all the shenanigans that come with that world. What matters is whether someone can apply their coding skills in Python, R or SQL to process large datasets, make sense of messy information, and ideally, if they are spatial (pun intended), to be able to produce a map or two.

Here’s the challenge. How do you filter CVs or even form a perception of who might be stronger? The truth is that you don’t. I have come to believe that when hiring for a technical position without asking for a live demo, hiring is essentially a gut feeling.

I’ve always thought that what I am really looking for in a hire is the same no matter the role: good judgement. And there’s no test for that, no metric and no reliable measurement. You notice it, you feel it, and you know it when it’s there. It is more like a harmony than a single note, something that resonates between you and the candidate.

David Heinemeier Hansson, co-founder of 37signals, once said that hiring is an exercise in human judgement rather than an algorithm to be cracked. I find myself agreeing with that too. Even with all the scorecards and structured questions in the world, you still end up making a call based on instinct.

This does not make the process easy. All of the candidates we saw had strong backgrounds, narrowed down to around twenty from more than two hundred applications. Because of the open nature of the role, we did not ask them to demo their technical skills. Personally, I am glad we did not. I have never seen the point of being asked live to “solve this now” or “design that on the spot.” Case studies, brain teasers, whiteboard coding. It all feels like theatre. A bunch of nonsense, really.

That does not mean gut feeling is guesswork. Research from the Journal of Management and Organization shows that intuition works best when combined with real expertise, especially for complex jobs. The more you understand the role, the more reliable your instinct becomes. That resonates with me. I know what the job demands day to day, and I can tell from how a candidate frames their experience and shows enthusiasm whether they are likely to thrive.

And it turns out I am not alone. A survey by People Management found that gut feeling remains the most common deciding factor in hiring decisions, even in an age obsessed with metrics and data. Hiring is about people. It is about trust. It is about who you can see yourself working with on a Monday morning when the deadlines are stacking up.

So yes, hiring is a gut feeling. Structured processes can help. Scorecards can help. In the end though, it comes down to human judgement. That is what hiring really is: choosing people, not just CVs.

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