Why Your Team Agrees With You | Full Send Management

I hired a senior salesperson years ago the way I had hired everyone before. I ran the screening, got down to two candidates who looked nearly identical on paper, and then sent them around to the leadership team one at a time. Each one got their time and came back to me with a read. I collected the reads, made the call, and that hire did not work out.

What I told myself then was that hiring is hard and sometimes you miss. That part is true. What I missed was that I had built a process where nobody could hear anybody else.

Every one of those conversations happened in a vacuum. The head of operations never heard what the service lead noticed. The junior salesperson never got to react to something the customer service lead flagged. I was the only one holding all the pieces, and I was also the person who had picked a favorite before the first interview started. I don't think anyone lied to me. I think they gave me a read that fit what they assumed I already wanted, because that is what tends to happen when the person collecting the opinions is the person who signs the checks.

The part that took me too long to see is that this does not get better as you move up. It gets worse. The higher you go, the more your first sentence in a meeting stops being an opinion and starts being a direction. People stop arguing with you and start calibrating to you, and it happens so gradually that you experience it as alignment. You walk out feeling good about the decision because everyone agreed, and they agreed because you went first.

So the next time I had a key sales role open, I changed the mechanics.

I put everyone in the same room for the interview. Senior and junior sales, the customer service lead, the service lead, the head of operations. I said almost nothing. I was there to watch. When the candidate left, I sat down in the middle of the table instead of at the head of it and asked the group to talk through what they had just seen while it was still fresh.

I framed two things up front. Every read in that room carried the same weight regardless of title or years, and I might not pick the person the group liked best, and either way the decision was mine to own.

Both candidates went through the same process. What I got out of it was not a cleaner answer. It was a fuller picture. Each person in that room was measuring the candidate against their own daily reality, and hearing them do it out loud in front of each other gave me a lens I could not have assembled from six separate conversations.

The vote came back split. I made the call. The person I hired turned out to be fine, not great.

The tidy version of this story ends with a perfect hire and mine did not. Hiring is close to a coin flip on your best day, and the panel did not fix my success rate.

What it fixed was the input. I stopped deciding with one set of eyes and calling it a consensus.

Think about the last real decision you made. Did the room actually challenge you, or did it agree with something you said in the first five minutes? If that question sits with you, reachout and let's talk. No pitch, just one outside read.

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