“If you had to construct a really bad way to make an important decision, you might come up with something like the stereotypical job interview. You must intuit a complete stranger’s ability and character in a small window of time, before making a commitment that could last decades. Some candidates will be so tense that asking them how their journey was will cause them to have a nervous breakdown. Everyone will be pretending to be someone they are not.
Most of your questions will be entirely predictable; most of the answers will have been rehearsed. To jolt candidates out of their comfort zones, you will ask one or two questions that bear no relevance to anything. If you were a cat trapped in a washing machine, how would you escape? If Jesus were asked who he would most like to have at a dinner party, why should he pick you?
Even with these oddball questions, the spread of AI tools means you cannot be totally sure that a human is the one answering. Jonathan Black, who runs the careers service at Oxford University, tells the story of a student asking an employer to repeat something “because the computer didn’t hear it”. To cap it all, you will be aware that you haven’t had lunch and still have another five interviews to do that day.
If this sounds like an irretrievably broken process, then the truth is more complex. Interviews have a reasonable claim to be the most useful part of the selection process. But they have to be conducted in the right way. And their flaws must be compensated for.
Researchers try to assess the validity of selection processes by correlating the scores that successful candidates get during an application with their subsequent performance in their new jobs. A meta-analysis of such research, published in 2022 by Paul Sackett of the University of Minnesota and his co-authors, found that structured job interviews have the most predictive value of any recruitment method, ahead of things like assessment centres or psychometric tests.
There are two big caveats to this endorsement of interviews, however. The first is the importance of the word “structured”. According to Winfred Arthur of Texas A&M University, that usually means a standardised set of job-related questions which are put to every candidate and each of which is scored according to an agreed system. (You could still ask that question about the cat in the washing machine, in other words, but you had better have a clear idea of what counts as a good answer and why.) An unstructured interview, in which hiring managers make things up on the fly and reach decisions based on gut instincts, has less than half the predictive validity of a structured one.
People have been preaching the gospel of structured interviews for so long that the mystery is why they are not more common. Perhaps interviewers worry that predictable questions are likely to tell them less, even though successful firms like Amazon go out of their way to offer advice on what candidates can expect in an interview. Perhaps managers balk at the time and thought required to construct a truly rigorous process, even though few decisions are regretted as much as a bad hire.
Mr Arthur’s best explanation is that structured interviews remove a sense of agency from interviewers. “You’re saying you can’t ask the questions you want and they’re going to say to you: ‘What the heck? What am I a manager for?’ ”
The second caveat is that even textbook interviews are not that good at predicting how candidates will do. According to Chris Hartwell of Utah State University, the research suggests that less than 20% of a person’s actual job performance can be attributed to scores in a structured interview. So it makes sense to layer lots of other assessments on top: specific personality tests, work samples and the like. Mr Hartwell says that a battery of measures might together be able to predict as much as 30-40% of a candidate’s eventual performance, an outcome he describes as “not great, but not bad”.
That’s because there is no foolproof way to judge an unfamiliar job candidate. Firms can tip the scales towards success once someone has joined, by offering proper onboarding and training. They can ensure that known quantities are in the running for jobs, by investing in internship programmes and encouraging existing employees to apply for open positions. But if you are interviewing a stranger for a job, it is best done with a script, a scoring system and a hefty dose of realism. No question.” [1]
1. How to conduct a job interview. The Economist; London Vol. 457, Iss. 9479, (Dec 20, 2025): 53.
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