Criteria #3 is toxic. It's one of those things people adopt with the best intentions, but (a) is often at odds with the best interests of the firm and (b) provides an enormous amount of cover for prejudices and, more perniciously, cognitive biases. When you're interviewing a candidate, assume your brain is trying to trip you up (it is!). Build a hiring process that treats your intuition as an adversary and eliminates cover for biases.
On one hand you have people with immense industry experience (such as yourself) advocating to drop the "do I actually like this person" approach and on the other hand you have people who also have immense industry experience advocating that culture fit should be one of the most important criteria.
I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts on eliminating prejudice (both intentional and unintentional) and cognitive biases whilst at the same time, ascertaining whether or not someone would be comfortable within your companies established culture and also contribute positively to said culture.
To clarify, the difference you aren't seeing between the groups is the incompetent managers define "sit next to" as "sit next to at the nudie bar" or gaming table or harry potter movie premier or frat house or pretty much any place other than work. AKA young inexperienced white frat boys only need apply.
In comparison, competent managers define the same "sit next to" as "sit next to during an emergency bug fix" or while hashing out a new feature idea or optimizing a slow task or automating a process or just gossiping about a new technology. These are the kind of managers who "dare" to hire non-white people or women or older than 25 yrs old etc. Usually their company is much more successful for obvious reasons.
I fail to see how criteria #3 in the parent comment: Do I want to sit next to you for the next 6 months or longer? is assumed to be toxic when it can be as easily assumed the intention is the latter half of your example.
When you hire somebody for your your team, company is not the only one stakeholder. The CEO won't spend 40 hours/week with new hire. Your personal productivity and happiness depends on new hire and if he has (1) bad communication skills (2) unpleasant to be around, it's no hire no matter his technical skills. There are exceptions to this rule of course - like when you won't personally work with the person or he is genius.
I largely agree with B but I'm not so sure about A -- particularly since hiring someone whom you don't want to be around is likely to affect your performance, which is likely also at odds with the best interests of the firm.
