The worst hiring practice Kasey Harboe Guentert has witnessed is lacking a clear hiring plan.

Harboe Guentert is an executive consultant at HR consultancy APTMetrics, where she helps employers make “smart, fair, and data-driven decisions when building their teams.” She is also the co-author of The Hiring Handbook, which helps employers better recruit, assess, and select candidates.

“Every new requisition shows up and the hiring manager just does it all by themselves, without any support necessarily,” Harboe Guentert said. “The way they actually conduct the interview and the questions they ask and how they evaluate the capabilities of the candidate, it's just completely random.”

It’s a practice she says is “unfortunately still common,” and one that ultimately hurts hiring managers and their teams. Inarticulate hiring processes can be time consuming, Harboe Guentert said. Even if hiring managers ask good questions, without objective criteria to evaluate candidates, they can end up choosing candidates based on personal feelings (aka, hiring based on vibes).

Hiring managers typically have a good understanding of what success looks like in the job they’re hiring for, even if they haven’t formally communicated that. But encouraging them to focus on that “will get them away from the: “Can you sell me this pen?” or, “do I have a beer with this person?” of question,” Harboe Guentert said.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

What’s the best change you’ve made at a place you’ve worked?

One of the most meaningful changes I led at Airbnb was building out structured, role-specific definitions of what success looks like for jobs like software engineers, machine learning engineers, customer support, or members of our trust team. These definitions, called competencies, helped us create a shared language for evaluating talent, making hiring and promotion decisions fairer, more transparent, and more consistent. It aligned teams around expectations and gave people a clearer path to grow.

‍What’s the biggest misconception people might have about your job?

That my work is just about writing job descriptions or checking boxes in the hiring process. In reality, it’s about shaping how companies define success, grow talent, and make decisions that affect real people’s careers. I use research, data, and deep collaboration to build systems that help organizations hire and develop fairly and strategically. It’s not just HR—it’s business-critical design.

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