I Was Running the Search. I Almost Became the Problem.

There's a photo of me on a lake. Orange life vest. Sunglasses. Both hands on the oars, looking like I have somewhere to go.

I look confident in that photo. Certain. Like a guy who knows which direction he's rowing.

I think about that image sometimes when I reflect on the work of hiring, because I've learned that confidence and clarity are not the same thing. And there have been moments in my career — moments I'm not proud of — where I was rowing hard in completely the wrong direction, absolutely certain I was right.

This is a story about one of those moments. Or more precisely, it's the story of what I had to do before the moment could become something better.

The Search

Not long ago, Samira and I led a staffing search together for a small, highly specialized therapy practice. The kind of practice where the work is personal and the stakes are real: clients navigating complex trauma, couples doing some of the hardest relational work of their lives. The therapist leading the practice had built something intentional. Something that required a very specific kind of person to support it: someone who could run tight operations, communicate with warmth, hold difficult emotional content without being consumed by it, and show up with discipline and care in equal measure.

The role: Practice Manager. Remote. Permanent. High trust, high autonomy, high responsibility.

On paper, I knew what I was looking for. But as the search got underway, I started noticing something uncomfortable. I was drawn to certain candidates in ways I couldn't fully explain. I kept using words like "polish" and "professional presence" in my notes. I was making quick calls about who seemed like "a fit" for the culture before I had enough information to actually make that judgment.

I recognized the pattern. I've lived on the other side of it.

The Mirror Moment

I wrote a post not long ago called "I Had the Highest Degree in the Room. It Still Wasn't Enough." In it, I talked about what it felt like to be passed over for promotions despite having the qualifications, the experience, and the performance to justify advancement. I talked about how bias doesn't need malicious intent to cause real harm. How it lives in the half-second decisions we make. How it hides inside words like "fit," "polish," and "potential."

And here I was. Running a search. Using those same words.

That's the thing about bias that nobody talks about enough: it doesn't stay on one side of the table. It travels. It can live inside the person who experienced it just as easily as the person who caused it. And if you don't do the internal work — not just the awareness work, but the active, ongoing, in-the-moment work — you can perpetuate exactly what you know hurt you.

I had to stop and ask myself some hard questions. Who was I picturing when I imagined the "right" person for this role? What did they sound like? What were their credentials? Was I weighing all the candidates against an ideal that I had constructed, at least in part, from bias? Was I gravitating toward "familiar" when the role actually required "excellent"?

The answers were uncomfortable. Not because I had done anything overtly harmful, but because I could see the direction I was drifting. And drift, unchecked, becomes direction.

So I stopped. I course-corrected. And then I did the work I should have been doing from the start.

What Bias-Aware Hiring Actually Looks Like

Here is what I changed, and what I'd offer to anyone leading a search:

I rewrote my internal criteria in concrete, observable terms. "Polish" is not a criterion. "Responds to client messages within X hours with clear, warm, boundaried language" is a criterion. The more abstract your language, the more room you leave for bias to fill in the blanks.

I asked the same questions, in the same order, to every candidate. Not because I was running a robotic process, but because consistency is one of the few real tools we have against the brain's tendency to search for confirmation once it's formed an impression.

I named the assumptions I was carrying. Out loud, to myself, and sometimes to Samira. What was I bringing into the room from past searches? From past hires that worked out? From candidates I had unconsciously decided I liked before the interview even started?

I separated "comfortable" from "qualified." The two are not the same. Familiarity can feel like competence. It isn't. I pushed myself, every time I felt an instinctive pull toward a candidate, to ask: what specific evidence is driving this? If I couldn't name it, I couldn't trust it.

I listened for the things that couldn't be coached. Not credentials. Not years of experience in the "right" software. The things underneath: how someone talked about clients in distress, how they described owning a mistake, how much they understood that the administrative role in a trauma-focused practice is not just operations, it's care. Those things are harder to fake and harder to bias, because they're about character, not category.

What Happened

A few weeks into the search, Samira and I found the right person.

What I can say is this: when I held this candidate against the actual criteria, the real criteria, the ones that reflected what the role truly required and what the clients actually deserved, everything lined up. Methodical, warm, emotionally grounded, experienced in exactly the right ways, and deeply thoughtful about why this kind of work matters. The kind of person who understood, without being told, that running operations in a trauma-focused practice is not just logistics. It's an act of care.

The offer was made. It was accepted.

I don't tell this story to congratulate myself. I tell it because I think a lot of people who run searches and make hiring decisions believe that good intentions are enough. That because they care about equity, their process is equitable. That because they've read the books and sat through the trainings, their gut is trustworthy.

It isn't. Mine wasn't. And I had to be willing to catch myself in the act to get to the right outcome.

A Brief Case Study

Here's a pattern we see frequently in our work with organizations:

A team is looking for a new hire. The hiring manager is a thoughtful, mission-driven leader who cares deeply about the work and about building a good team. They interview eight candidates. Four of them check every box on the job description. But they end up recommending someone who "just felt right." When pressed, they describe the candidate as "a natural communicator" and someone who "would fit in with the team."

The candidate they choose has a similar background to three of the current team members. The same educational profile. The same communication style. A similar cultural reference set.

Months later, the team is still struggling with the same blind spots it had before the hire. The same gaps in perspective. The same unspoken dynamics. And the hiring manager, genuinely, cannot understand why. They thought they chose the best person.

They did. They chose the best person for the team, as it already existed. Not the best person for the team it needed to become.

This is affinity bias in motion. It doesn't look like discrimination. It looks like good judgment. It feels like trust. And it produces, over and over, teams that are less innovative, less resilient, and less equipped to serve diverse clients, communities, and stakeholders than they could be.

The antidote is not to distrust your instincts entirely. It's to build a process that doesn't depend on them alone.

Why This Matters Beyond Hiring

Bias in the hiring process is one of the most consequential places bias lives, because it determines who gets to be in the room at all. But the patterns that show up in hiring: affinity bias, confirmation bias, the tendency to confuse comfort with competence, those same patterns live in performance reviews, project assignments, promotion decisions, and everyday team interactions.

The search I led for this practice was a small one. One role. One hire. But it reminded me of something I have to keep relearning: doing this work on behalf of others requires doing the work on yourself first. Not once. Ongoing.

You can't lead a bias-aware process if you haven't looked honestly at what you're carrying into it.

What We Do

Mission-Driven Staffing Services is one of the offerings within our broader HR Strategy & Support practice at Hyphens and Spaces, which covers everything from strategic HR planning and policy development to compensation design, talent management, and fractional HR leadership. If your organization needs people infrastructure that actually reflects your values, that's the work we do.

On the staffing side specifically, we support nonprofits and small, mission-driven organizations in identifying, vetting, and placing the right candidates, from intake to offer, with the same bias-aware, people-centered approach that runs through everything we do.

If you're preparing for a search or if your HR infrastructure needs a closer look, we'd love to talk. Explore HR Strategy & Support or schedule a discovery call

One More Thing

That photo on the lake. I took it years ago, before this search, before most of the work I've done at Hyphens and Spaces, before a lot of the growing I've had to do.

The guy in that photo was rowing with confidence. He thought he knew where he was going.

What he didn't know yet is that confidence isn't the same as direction. That the hardest work isn't in the stroke. It's in knowing when to stop, look up, and ask yourself whether you're heading somewhere worth going.

That's the work. It never really ends. But it's the only work worth doing.

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Hyphens and Spaces partners with nonprofits and mission-driven organizations to build equitable workplaces and run thoughtful, values-aligned searches. Mission-Driven Staffing Services is part of our full HR Strategy & Support practice. If this resonated, we'd love to connect. Schedule a discovery call