Job Interview Flaws

"If you hire people by interviewing them, you will hire people who are really good at being interview."

Relying on interviews is not a great hiring strategy [1]Better to use testing, either by psychometrics or assessment days (group tasks, short notice presentations etc.). [2][1] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20140606071003-7589947-no-cor...[2] <a href="http://www.inc.com/articles/2002

I see your answer as boiling down to "That's a false dichotomy. We need experienced interviewers working with a good interview process in the form of deep and open questions that require experience to grade correctly."

Perhaps your interview process is suboptimized for finding talent.Google famously struggled with this issue. They found the best predictor of how someone will perform in a job is a work sample test (29%).This entails giving candidates a sample piece of work, similar to that which they would do in the job, and assessing their performance at it. Even this can’t predict performance perfectly > <a href="http://www.wired.com/2015/04/hire-like-google/" rel="nofo

I appreciate the kind sentiment. Interviewing and hiring the right candidate for a job is a near-infinitely complex problem. I mentioned in an earlier post that 5 hours to assess an employee's performance will have lots of false positives / false negatives. Is this the best way to interview? Probably not. If this style of interview can be a good predictor in a large sample size then maybe it's justifiable. I'm assuming the FAANG companies are doing it with lots of statistics

How do you know a prospective employee is worth hiring without testing?

It sounds like a good way? Yes, I agree intuitively it sounds reasonable, but that alone is not considered a best practice.Why do we all work so hard to go by good data in our real work, but when it comes to interviewing someone we’re encouraged to just wing it, or use our best judgement? Careers can be affected with this stuff, and bad hiring decisions in either direction can hurt an organization.There is research done on hiring but the learnings are slow to benefit the practice. General

Is that true? I think I recall hearing that studies show interviewing actually usually leads to worse results. Here's one that seems related to academic admissions, not hiring per se, but similar vein: http://journal.sjdm.org/12/121130a/jdm121130a.htmlI think clearly the best SNR is from working with someone. That's not easy to fit into the hiring process, though...

Don't test then. Have somebody with real life experience judge the candidate. And by real life experience I don't mean 10 years in the same job...Anyway the interview process is so broken that they could actually improve it by just flipping a coin.

I think companies could test their interview process this way. Fill some positions by choosing from the candidate pool at random (there could be a baseline filter to ensure a minimum level of competence) and compare the random hires with the regular hires to see how much of a difference the interview process really makes.