Your interview score depends on who sat before you. Not on you.

Two candidates. The exact same answers, the same experience, the same performance in the room. Yet one gets recommended and the other doesn’t. The difference? Who was interviewed right before them that day.
In 2013, Uri Simonsohn (Wharton) and Francesca Gino (Harvard) published a study recruiters would rather not read. They analyzed more than 9,000 MBA admissions interviews across ten years. Their conclusion: a candidate’s score depends, to a meaningful degree, on who the interviewer already saw that same day.
Interviewers, it turns out, unconsciously keep a daily quota in their head. Simonsohn and Gino call it “narrow bracketing”: instead of judging every candidate against a fixed standard, interviewers ration their “yeses” across the day. Already given three strong recommendations that morning? The interviewer becomes unconsciously more reluctant to give a fourth, even if that candidate performs just as well, or better.
It cuts both ways. Come up right after a weak candidate, and you benefit from the contrast, you look stronger than you are. Come up right after an outstanding one, and your own performance suddenly looks less impressive, even though nothing about what you actually showed has changed.

This isn’t a fringe finding

Economists Radbruch and Schiprowski confirmed the pattern in 2024 in the Review of Economic Studies, this time with real hiring data instead of admissions interviews. The same sequence-dependence showed up again. This isn’t a quirk of MBA admissions committees. It’s how human evaluators work, in every industry, in every interview round.

What actually decides your chances (besides your own performance)

• The time slot of your interview. Last on a strong day? You’re standing in the shadow of whoever came before you.
• How many candidates the interviewer has already recommended that day. Their unconscious “yes quota” may already be spent before you walk in.
• How weak or strong the candidate before you was. Your score is relative to them, not to a fixed bar.
• How tired or rushed the interviewer is by the end of the day.

None of these factors have anything to do with whether you’re the right person for the job. And yet they help decide whether you get hired.

Why this doesn’t surprise us at Assess4me

This is exactly the problem we’re structurally trying to solve. Not by training interviewers to be “more objective,” that doesn’t fix it, it’s baked into how human judgment works, not a lack of good intentions. But by decoupling the evaluation from whoever happened to sit in the chair before you.
In our game-based assessments, every candidate is scored against a fixed behavioral standard, not against the candidate from ten minutes earlier. No daily quota, no contrast effect, no difference between 9am and 5pm. The same performance earns the same score, regardless of who happened to go before you.
Interviews still have value for getting to know someone. But when the outcome depends on your place in the line-up, you’re measuring something other than who the best candidate actually is.