Some hiring myths are dramatic. They sound obviously wrong once you hear them out loud. “You should always hire the person who seems the most confident.” “Gaps in a CV are a red flag.” Those are easy to dismiss. The myths that actually do damage are subtler. They are reasonable-sounding principles that get embedded in […]
Some hiring myths are dramatic. They sound obviously wrong once you hear them out loud. “You should always hire the person who seems the most confident.” “Gaps in a CV are a red flag.” Those are easy to dismiss.
The myths that actually do damage are subtler. They are reasonable-sounding principles that get embedded in processes and documentation and then never get questioned, even as the evidence against them accumulates. They are the habits that feel sensible right up until the moment you notice that another strong candidate just accepted somewhere else.
Here are five of the most common hiring technical talent myths, the ones I see most often in the companies we work with, and the ones that are most reliably costing them engineers they should have closed.
The logic sounds solid. Technical hiring decisions are high-stakes. The more perspectives you gather, the more comprehensive your view of the candidate. Having five people in the debrief catches things that one or two people might miss.
The reality is more complicated. Research on group decision-making consistently shows that adding more decision-makers beyond a certain point does not improve the quality of decisions — it increases the opportunity for bias to enter the process, slows down the timeline, and creates coordination overhead that extends the hiring process by days or weeks.
More specifically, in hiring technical talent, the marginal value of a fourth or fifth interviewer is usually very low. If your first three interviewers — a technical evaluator, a team fit assessor, and a hiring manager — all see the same thing in a candidate, the fourth and fifth interviewers are unlikely to produce material new information. They are adding process, not insight.
The companies that run their technical hiring process most effectively tend to cap their interview panel at three people, be deliberate about what each person is assessing and why, and debrief quickly and consistently using structured criteria. They make faster decisions with the same or better accuracy. And they lose fewer candidates in the waiting.
This myth is widespread, quietly prevalent, and demonstrably wrong. The belief is that a strong candidate who asks about compensation in the first or second conversation is signalling that they are primarily financially motivated, which is interpreted as a red flag — an early indicator of someone who will leave for a better offer whenever one comes along.
The reality is that asking about compensation early is a sign of self-awareness and professionalism. Engineers who know their market value, who are currently employed and not desperate to move, and who have received multiple approaches tend to ask about salary early because they are evaluating whether it is worth investing time in the process. They are not asking because they are primarily money-driven. They are asking because they are organised and respectful of their own time.
Penalising candidates for this when hiring technical talent means that the engineers most likely to be professionally confident and well-regarded in the market will be filtered out of your process before you have had a real conversation. The candidates who do not ask about salary early, by contrast, are often either unaware of their market value or sufficiently desperate to move that they will take what is offered. Neither of those things is actually what you want.
Talk about compensation clearly and early. It saves time for everyone and signals that you are a straightforward organisation to work with.
Energy in a hiring conversation feels meaningful. A candidate who leans forward, asks sharp questions about the roadmap, seems genuinely excited about the technical challenge — these are pleasant signals in a room. They are also not reliably predictive of how someone will perform once they start.
The interview is a high-stakes, performed context. Most candidates have prepared. They have done their research on the company. They are presenting the version of themselves they think you want to see. Interview enthusiasm is partly genuine and partly strategic, and the two are very difficult to distinguish in real time.
When hiring technical talent, the more reliable indicators of future performance are things that do not require performance. How someone handles being wrong about something during the technical discussion. Whether they ask questions that demonstrate they have thought carefully about the actual work rather than just about making a good impression. How they talk about the work they have done rather than how they present themselves.
Enthusiasm is a pleasant thing. It is not an assessment criterion. Treating it as one means you are selecting for the candidates who interview well rather than the ones who work well. Those two groups overlap, but they are not the same group.
The argument is intuitive. Remote work expanded the talent pool to include engineers regardless of geography. You are no longer limited to candidates who can commute to your office. The world’s engineers are now accessible.
What actually happened is the competition intensified in proportion to the pool expansion. Yes, you can now hire an engineer based in Warsaw or Lisbon. But so can every company in the United States, the UK, Germany, France, and Australia. The same engineers who became geographically accessible to you also became geographically accessible to every company that was already paying more than you.
Remote work made hiring technical talent more competitive, not easier. It raised the stakes for every dimension of the hiring experience — how compelling your offer is, how clearly you articulate the quality of the work, how smoothly your hiring process runs, how quickly you move. Companies that adapted to this reality — that understood the expanded pool meant expanded competition — have done well. Companies that assumed remote work was a gift without considering the implications have found themselves competing for talent with organisations that were already global-first.
This myth is comfortable because it is defensible. If someone has done the exact thing you need them to do before, at a similar scale, in a similar environment, they should be able to do it again. The logic is straightforward. The problem is what it excludes.
The most relevant candidate on paper is often the candidate who will replicate what has already been done rather than improve on it. They know how to solve the problem you currently have. But your problem is about to change, as it always does. The technical landscape is about to shift, as it always does. The team is going to need to learn new approaches, as it always does.
When hiring technical talent for roles that will require adaptation and growth, the candidate with the greatest depth of directly relevant experience is not always the right choice over a candidate with strong adjacent experience and demonstrably fast learning. Capability to grow in a role is often more valuable over a two-year horizon than perfection of fit at the point of hire.
The best technical hiring decisions account for where the role will need to go, not just where it currently is. That requires a different framing of “most relevant experience” — one that includes learning speed, problem-solving adaptability, and demonstrated capacity to operate in conditions of technical uncertainty.
Each of these myths was probably adopted for a good reason. More interviewers felt like more diligence. Salary questions felt like a screening mechanism. Interview enthusiasm felt like evidence. Remote work felt like expansion. Relevant experience felt like safety.
Replacing these myths does not require abandoning all structure. It requires auditing each stage of your hiring technical talent process against a specific question: is this producing signal that genuinely predicts performance, or is it a habit that feels like due diligence without actually providing it?
The companies that answer that question honestly — and are willing to act on the answer — end up with faster processes, stronger shortlists, and better hires. The companies that do not end up running the same searches over and over, losing candidates to the same avoidable causes, and concluding that the problem is the market.
The problem is rarely the market. And the fix is usually much more accessible than it appears. If you want to explore what a myth-free approach to hiring technical talent looks like in practice, the step-by-step guide and the case study in this series are good starting points. And if you want to talk through what this looks like for your specific team and role, Tallenxis works with companies at exactly this stage.