By the time a candidate joins your first call, you already have an opinion about them. You’ve read the resume, looked at their answers to the application questions, and maybe reviewed a pre-screening assessment. Often, this means the hiring manager walks into the first conversation with a set of assumptions and spends the interview confirming them. And this pattern repeats itself throughout the whole interview process.

A first interview that went differently

This doesn’t have to be the case. A great example was a search we ran for a senior head of marketing at a Series D company. The company already had a marketing team, one that had grown up with the business and was good at what it did, but never quite evolved into the strategic function the business needed.

The company needed someone who had made that shift before. Someone who could turn a task-oriented department into a value-add for the business: working with sales to build brand recognition and generate high-quality leads rather than simply passing whatever came through, and working with product so the go-to-market strategy was clearly understood and the business could properly highlight features that were less known to the market.

To make sure we had the right person, we took a different tack. On the first call, we laid it all out. Here’s what the team does well. Here’s where we’d like to go and here’s where we need someone to bring direction and expertise.

The person we hired fit the bill. While they came from a larger org, they’d grown with that company through a period that included both hypergrowth and acquisitions. Our client had been through an acquisition in the past year as well. When we described the challenge, they leaned in. They started connecting it to work they had done before. Their questions moved from tactical to strategic: who they would be working with, and what the biggest outcome was that the business needed in the first six to twelve months. They had enjoyed the building phase most, and this role was a chance to build a function.

None of that was readily apparent on the resume.

The confirmation call

Most hiring managers don’t set out to run a confirmation call. But often the resume, and if they’re lucky, some screening notes or a recruiter summary are the only information they have going in, and it’s natural to use the call to test it.

There is research on what this does to the conversation. In a field study published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, Dougherty, Turban and Callender (1994) coded 79 real interviews run by three interviewers who had formed first impressions from application forms and test scores. When the first impression was positive, interviewers showed more positive regard, did more selling of the company, shared more information about the job, and gathered less information. The candidates behaved differently too.[1] More recent work points the same way. Across 163 mock interviews, Swider, Barrick and Harris (2016, Journal of Applied Psychology) found that impressions formed during opening small talk shaped how interviewers rated the structured questions that followed, most strongly the earliest answers.[2]

From the candidate’s view, the sell, the warmth and the information about the job went to the people whose paperwork looked the best.

What a resume can’t tell you

The truth is, a resume is a static document that lists where someone has been, but it doesn’t carry the connective tissue that makes their story interesting and applicable.

It won’t tell you why they moved from position A to position B, or why they left one company for another. It won’t tell you what they’re grappling with in their role today. And it can’t answer the simplest question of all: why are we on this call today? What’s the real reason for this conversation?

Those answers only come out in conversation, and only if you leave room for them.

Put the challenge on the table in the first interview

The most useful thing we do on a first interview is describe the challenge the business is facing, honestly and specifically, and then listen to how the candidate engages with it. That gives you a far better read on the questions that matter:

• Does their experience apply to this problem?
• Can they solve it, or help you solve it?
• For roles where potential matters more than track record, are they curious? Do they learn quickly and apply themselves? Have they navigated the ambiguity of a high-growth company before?

Listen for ownership as well. Strong candidates talk about outcomes as theirs, and they’re clear about what they owned and what was shared with a team. That distinction matters more than most hiring managers expect. Seeing the work comes later in the process. On the first call, you’re listening for whether they can speak to it.

Watch for the turn

There is a turning point in every first interview. This is the point where the candidate begins to engage. They say something like, “That’s interesting, I did something similar to solve a problem like that.” Or their questions shift. They stop asking about tactical details and start asking who they would be working with, or what success looks like six to twelve months in.

That shift is the other half of the first call working. While you’re assessing whether they can meet your challenge, they’re working out whether your challenge is one they want. That’s why the sell has to be specific to the person: why this role is interesting for their career, what in their background carries over, what they would get to work on, and where the company is in its growth.

Research on applicant attraction is consistent with this. In a meta-analysis of what draws applicants to a job, Uggerslev, Fassina and Kraichy (2012, Personnel Psychology) found that a candidate’s perceived fit with the job or organization was the strongest predictor of attraction.[3] An earlier meta-analysis of 71 studies by Chapman and colleagues (2005, Journal of Applied Psychology) found that how recruiters behaved predicted attraction, while their demographics did not.[4] Fit is something a candidate has to see for themselves.

“They weren’t engaged”

Hiring managers often come out of a first interview with the same feedback: the candidate didn’t seem that engaged.

Sometimes that’s accurate. Often, it means the candidate hasn’t been through enough of an engagement cycle to want to be there. A hiring manager’s first interview is usually set up to answer one question: can this person do the job? That’s the right question, but it’s only half of what a first call needs to do. If nobody has shown the candidate why the role should excite them, low engagement is a reasonable response.

Engagement isn’t only something a candidate brings to the call. It’s something you build during it. A strong recruiter raises it by sharing the things that make the candidate want to move forward. That’s a large part of what a good talent acquisition partner brings to a hiring process: someone set up to assess and engage in the same conversation, so the hiring manager meets candidates who already understand why the role matters.

Engineer a way for candidates to show their best

When you design an interview process, avoid negative friction. The goal isn’t to trip someone up. It’s to engineer a way for candidates to show you their best, so they feel empowered to show up.

That isn’t only a courtesy. In a meta-analysis published in the Canadian Journal of Behavioural Science, Powell, Stanley and Brown (2018) found a negative relationship (r = -.19) between interview anxiety and interview performance.[5] Anxious candidates tend to score lower. A call that feels like a test of the resume adds to that pressure, and the read you get is worse because of this. A call built around a real problem gives people something to work on with you.

The first call is where everyone decides

Back to the marketing search. On paper, the eventual hire was a capable marketer from a larger company. In conversation, they were someone who had helped integrate an acquisition, loved building, and saw this role as a chance to build a marketing function the business would rely on. Their resume got them the call. The challenge is what kept them in the process.

Your first call isn’t a resume check. It’s where you find out whether a person can meet your challenge, and where they find out whether your challenge is worth taking on.