is it petty to hold small details against internal candidates?

A reader writes:

I’m hiring for some new roles in my team and this has generated some excitement from internal folks looking to grow in their careers. That’s great! I’m always happy to meet with internal people before they submit resumes/go through the formal interview process, it’s very much a part of our team culture.

However, twice now, different internal candidates have scheduled a one-on-one with me during a time when I already have a meeting and am showing as booked! This has kind of thrown me for a loop (do they not know how to use our extremely basic common scheduling software? do they think I’m booked for fun and will reschedule for them?) and honestly given me some hesitation around them as real candidates.

But then I was wondering, is this just a personal pet peeve of mine and not a genuine yellow flag for their candidacy? Do personal pet peeves get to factor into my hiring decision if I’m their manager? If they move to the interview stage, are there ways I can feel out if they have a lack of attention to detail/lack of care for people’s work schedules without just saying, “Hey, why did you schedule a one-on-one for one of the only times I was not available?”

The primary lens you want to run all concerns like this through is: how does this relate to the skills and qualities that are need to do this specific job well?

If something is genuinely just a pet peeve but doesn’t have any real connection to what it will take to do the job well — like if you were irrationally irritated by people who don’t record an outgoing message on their voicemail or who write “gentle reminder” in emails (that last one is my own pet peeve) — you should set that aside. Having a mildly annoying habit doesn’t mean they wouldn’t be the best candidate for the job. But some pet peeves do very much speak to how the person would approach the work, and those are fair game to consider.

In this case, I assume the scheduling stuff is alarming you because it feels like it speaks to a lack of attention to detail, or maybe that they don’t know how to use very basic office systems, pointing to a sort of baseline incompetence. Those are reasonable to consider.

That said, these are also internal candidates, so you have access to a lot more info about them than you would have if they were external candidates. The reason small things can matter a lot with external candidates is because when you’re working with very limited info about someone, you have no choice but to rely on whatever info you get during the hiring process — but that is not the case with internal candidates.

So: are either of these candidates your direct reports? If so, you probably have enough regular contact with them and their work that you know if they do in fact have issues with attention to detail. If they don’t report to you and you don’t have a lot of interaction with them, it’s a reasonable question to pose to their direct manager (whose input you should be soliciting on them regardless).

And you can also ask about things that are weighing on you! It’s fine to say, “I noticed you tried to schedule a one-on-one for one of the only times I wasn’t available — is my calendar not showing up correctly on your end, or how did that happen?” (Note you’re not assuming the error was on their end and are allowing for the possibility that it wasn’t.) Just make sure you evaluate the answer, whatever it is, through the lens of what actually matters for the job you’re hiring for.

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