As a former VP of Product who hired hundreds of product managers, engineers, and designers, and as the founder of a successful startup, I’ve conducted countless job interviews over the years.
But research and experience have convinced me that unstructured job interviews are poor predictors of job performance.
Here’s why traditional job interviews don’t work – and what companies should do instead to hire the best talent.
The Problem with Unstructured Interviews
Multiple studies have shown that unstructured interviews, where candidates answer open-ended questions, are poor predictors of job success:
- In 1979, the University of Texas Medical School had to quickly admit 50 more students who had initially been rejected after interviews. Researchers later found those students performed just as well as their classmates in terms of grades, honors, and graduation rate – the interviews added nothing of value.
- A meta-analysis of 85 years of research found unstructured interviews were only slightly better than chance at predicting job performance.
- Research participants who interviewed students made worse predictions of their future GPAs than those who just reviewed biographical information, because the interviews introduced misleading, irrelevant information.
These studies demonstrate that unstructured job interviews don’t work as an effective hiring tool.
The Illusion of Insight
So why do companies keep relying on unstructured interviews if they’re so ineffective? Part of the problem is that we’re naturally overconfident in our ability to evaluate people based on a short conversation.
Humans are notoriously bad at making accurate judgments based on first impressions and thin slices of behavior. We see meaning and patterns that aren’t really there.
Interviewers consistently report having a gut feeling about a candidate after meeting them – but those instincts are often just stories we tell ourselves based on flimsy evidence.
As psychologist Daniel Kahneman wrote in Thinking, Fast and Slow,”
Overconfident professionals sincerely believe they have expertise, act as experts and look like experts. You will have to struggle to remind yourself that they may be in the grip of an illusion.
There’s a popular notion that you can tell everything you need to know about a person from a five-minute interaction – which is why some companies rely on tricks like asking the receptionist how a candidate treated them.
But research has thoroughly debunked the idea that our intuition is a reliable guide in evaluating people, especially in short encounters.
In Strangers to Ourselves, psychologist Timothy D. Wilson catalogued the many ways our mental processes are hidden from our conscious awareness.
It turns out there’s a lot more going on under the hood than we realize when making judgments and decisions. Our brains take in far more information than we can consciously process, so our unconscious minds create shortcuts and stories to make sense of it all.
The problem is, those hidden processes are subject to a host of cognitive biases that distort our thinking in job interviews:
- The Halo Effect: How attractive, charismatic and likeable candidates are seen as more competent.
- Confirmation Bias: The tendency to search for or interpret information in a way that confirms our preexisting beliefs.
- In-Group Bias: Unconsciously favoring candidates who are similar to us.
- Anchoring Bias: Relying too heavily on one trait or piece of information.
- Fundamental Attribution Error: Placing too much emphasis on personality vs. situational factors.
These mental blindspots cause hiring managers to make irrational, inconsistent decisions based on factors that don’t actually predict job success.
The Perils of Persuasion
While interviewers struggle to make accurate assessments, candidates use an array of tactics to manipulate their perception.
Many of these techniques are encouraged by popular interview advice:
- List jobs where you were fired or laid off as present
- Practice exact answers to specific interview questions
- Get coaching and do infinite mock interviews to perfect them
While some of this advice may actually help candidates perform better in interviews, a lot of it is aimed at gaming the process and curating a misleading self-image.
Candidates are essentially attempting to hack interviewers’ hidden biases to gain an advantage. And the more coachable or fake they are, the worse this is for employers.
The savvy candidate knows that interviews are more like dates than genuine job auditions. It’s not about honestly revealing your flaws – it’s about making yourself as attractive as possible.
An entire interview prep industry encourages candidates to puff up their credentials, hide their weaknesses, and say whatever they think the interviewer wants to hear.
But just like dating, this artificial charm doesn’t last. Once hired, the honeymoon ends fast when the employee’s actual abilities and personality come to light.
By then it may be too late, and the company is stuck with a bad hire in an important role. According to one survey, a whopping 74% of employers admitted to hiring the wrong person for a position.
Diversity Downsides
Unstructured interviews also open the door for discrimination and bias to creep into hiring decisions. A famous study in 2000 sent out thousands of resumes that were identical except for the names – some had traditionally White-sounding names like Emily and Greg, while others had names like Lakisha and Jamal that are more commonly associated with African Americans.
The study found that resumes with white-sounding names received 50% more callbacks for interviews. It revealed the pervasive impact of implicit racial bias in hiring – even when companies think their process is totally fair and objective.
Similar results have been found in studies on age, gender, weight, and disability discrimination – showing that interviewers consistently make judgments based on biases they may not even be aware of.
This not only perpetuates workplace inequities – it causes companies to miss out on great talent. When skilled candidates are overlooked due to factors that have nothing to do with job performance, businesses suffer. And our economy and society lose out when workers aren’t employed based on their full ability and potential.
The Futility Trap
The ultimate absurdity of job interviews is that so much weight is placed on them even though employers often admit they’re ineffective.
According to one survey, over 90% of hiring managers said they’ve made bad hires that they regretted – yet they keep conducting interviews the same way.
Many leaders recognize on some level that interviews are imperfect – but they often believe they have special insight or intuition that allows them to read between the lines and spot great candidates.
This is a classic case of illusory superiority – when you mistakenly assess your abilities as greater than they actually are. Study after study has shown that we are terrible judges of our own competence and expertise. It’s clear that job interviews don’t work, yet companies keep relying on them out of habit and belief in their own intuition.
But there’s an even deeper reason why interviews persist despite all the evidence that they don’t work: We’re biased to believe in them. Two powerful psychological forces keep the interview process entrenched:
- The Sunk Cost Fallacy: The more time, money and energy we invest in something, the harder it is to accept that it might be useless. Walking away feels like a waste.
- Confirmation Bias: Once we form an impression of a candidate in an interview, we tend to look for information that confirms that initial belief and downplay evidence to the contrary.
Together, these mental blindspots create a vicious cycle. We keep doubling down on interviews because they’re the way it’s always been done. We tell ourselves stories about how insightful and accurate we are without rigorously tracking the actual results. It’s a collective delusion – propped up by outdated, unscientific hiring traditions.
Escaping Pseudoscience: Alternatives to Job Interviews That Don’t Work
The good news is that there’s a better way. By focusing on data, structure and objectivity in the hiring process, employers can dramatically improve the quality of their hires and create a more equitable and effective workforce.
Here are four proven strategies for upgrading interviews and screening job candidates:
1. Use Structured Interviews
Unlike a typical interview with vague, open-ended questions, a structured interview asks standardized, job-relevant questions with clear criteria to assess the answers. Structured interviews are up to twice as effective at predicting job performance compared to unstructured ones.
To create a structured interview:
- Analyze the job and define the key skills, knowledge and abilities required for success
- Develop a set of questions to test those specific competencies, focusing on past behavior
- Create a rubric or scale to evaluate candidates’ answers consistently
- Ask all candidates the same set of questions in the same order
- Take notes and score responses immediately after each interview
It sounds simple, but most companies fail to be this clear and systematic in their interviews. Structured interviews are one of the most effective ways to gather comparable, quantitative data on candidates – while reducing the influence of bias and gut feelings.
2. Use Work Sample Tests
The single best predictor of how someone will perform in a job is a work sample test (29% more predictive than interviews).
Instead of just talking about their skills, candidates actually perform job-related tasks so you can assess their abilities objectively. This is a true “audition” for the role.
Some examples of work samples:
- For software engineers, doing a coding exercise
- For designers, creating sample designs or mockups
- For sales reps, doing a product demo or sales pitch
- For marketers, developing a sample marketing plan
- For managers, preparing an executive briefing or strategy presentation
- For product managers, a work product
The key is to make the test as similar to the actual work as possible. It should be a standardized task with clear evaluation criteria. This allows you to see candidates’ thought process, problem-solving approach, and quality of work – not just how well they can sell themselves.
3. Evaluate “Past Performance”
Interviews are riddled with exaggerations and “impression management” because there’s no real accountability. Candidates can claim skills and accomplishments they don’t really have.
But as the saying goes, “the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior.” Systematically evaluating a candidate’s actual track record is far more useful than a verbal Q&A.
Some ways to assess past performance:
- Thoroughly check references, going beyond the provided list to get diverse perspectives
- Verify claims made on resumes/profiles by searching public records and profiles
- Request work samples/portfolios and dig into the specifics of candidates’ roles and results
- Conduct detailed technical/case interviews to probe their experience
- Use 360-degree reference check surveys to get feedback from managers, peers, and subordinates
The key is going beyond self-report to understand the specifics of what candidates have actually done in previous jobs that’s relevant to the target role. Past performance isn’t a perfect predictor, but it’s a lot more concrete and informative than a candidate’s self-crafted interview story.
4. Use Validated Assessments
Pre-employment assessments get a bad rap because of the nonsense “personality tests” used by many companies. But well-designed, properly validated tests are incredibly effective predictors of job performance (up to 4X more than interviews).
The two most useful types of assessments:
1.Cognitive Ability Tests
These measure general mental ability, and are especially predictive for complex jobs. Cognitive ability is one of the single best predictors of job performance across all job types.
2. Integrity Tests
These assess traits like conscientiousness, work ethic and honesty. Integrity is one of the best predictors of good citizenship behavior and lack of counterproductive work behaviors.
When evaluating any assessment, make sure it is:
- Reliable (consistent results)
- Valid (proven to predict important work outcomes)
- Unbiased (no adverse impact)
- Job-Related (clearly relevant to key competencies)
Assessments should be just one data point in a broader evidence-based hiring process. But as a supplement to interviews and other screening methods, well-designed tests add a layer of objectivity and predictive power that most companies sorely lack.
Rethinking Hiring: Moving Beyond Job Interviews That Don’t Work
Hiring the right people is one of the most important drivers of any organization’s success. But the way most companies approach hiring today is pseudoscience – a bunch of gut feelings, biases and unproven traditions masquerading as insight.
Bad hires are shockingly expensive – costing up to 3X the employee’s annual salary.
And the opportunity cost of passing over great talent is even higher. In a knowledge economy, businesses with the best people have an unbeatable advantage.
By upgrading interviews and making hiring more rigorous and scientific, companies can avoid the elusive “bad hire,” build stronger teams, and gain a true competitive edge. This is about more than just tweaking your process – it’s a fundamentally different philosophy of people decisions. One based on data over intuition, substance over style, and testing over talking.
Hiring, like any other business process, can be optimized and continuously improved. The companies that lead the way will be able to hire faster, identify overlooked talent, and retain ambitious people. And they’ll soon discover an amazing side effect:
When you start making smarter people decisions, you start making better business decisions too. You move faster, argue less, and spend more time on the work that actually matters.
In short, you’ll finally unleash the full potential of your greatest asset: your people.
