Work, Reconsidered: Are We Hiring for the Job or the Interview?

There is a strange assumption built into hiring that we rarely stop to question...

A superhero-like figure stands confidently in a vibrant office setting, embodying the concept of "Work, Reconsidered" with icons of communication, tools, and analytics surrounding her.

If someone performs exceptionally well in an interview, we tend to assume they'll perform exceptionally well in the job. Except those are two completely different things.

Some people are exceptionally good at interviewing. They know how to tell a polished story. They know when to pause, when to smile, how to build rapport, and how to turn almost any question into a perfectly packaged example of their competence. And some people who are exceptionally good at their jobs are terrible at all of that. Yet we keep putting candidates into highly controlled, high-pressure conversations and treating how they perform during those conversations as evidence of how they'll perform once they're actually hired.

I've spent more than 13 years in recruiting, and I've seen both sides of this. I've seen candidates struggle through interviews when I already knew they could do the work. Their experience supported it. Their results supported it. Sometimes I'd seen their work myself. Sometimes references confirmed it. Sometimes they went somewhere else and succeeded. I've also seen the opposite: candidates who were fantastic interviewers. Confident. Charismatic. Quick on their feet. They knew exactly how to tell the story we wanted to hear. And then they were hired and struggled.

That doesn't mean interviews are useless. It means we may be giving interview performance more predictive power than it deserves.

When Delivery Starts to Look Like Ability

Traditional interviews reward a very specific collection of abilities: thinking quickly, speaking comfortably about yourself, remembering examples on demand, reading social cues, understanding the unwritten rules of interviewing, and turning complicated experiences into neat two-minute stories. Those can be useful skills, but they aren't universally required to be good at a job.

A candidate who needs a few moments to process a question isn't necessarily less knowledgeable than someone who answers immediately. Someone who dislikes selling themselves isn't necessarily less accomplished. Someone who becomes anxious in an interview isn't necessarily going to struggle performing the actual work. And someone who has mastered the STAR method isn't necessarily the strongest person in the candidate pool. Sometimes what we're seeing is simply someone who has become very skilled at the interview itself. That's an important distinction.

Why Are We Testing Surprise?

A superheroine in a comic book style poses confidently, asking a thought-provoking question about the hiring process: "Are we hiring for the job or the interview?" Her assertive stance and speech bubble highlight the debate on effective recruitment.

One of the simplest changes I believe companies should make is also one that makes some hiring teams deeply uncomfortable... give candidates a base set of interview questions in advance. Not every possible follow-up question. Not a script. Not the answers. The questions. Ideally, I'd give them at least 48 hours in advance of the interview.

Whenever I suggest this, one objection comes up almost immediately:

"But, Rachel...what if they use AI to find the "right answer"?"

"But then they'll rehearse their answers."

Yes. They might prepare. That's not a flaw in the process. Preparation is a workplace skill.

We regularly expect employees to prepare for presentations, client meetings, performance conversations, project reviews, executive briefings, and difficult conversations. We don't deliberately withhold the subject of those conversations just to see how well someone can improvise. So why do we treat surprise as though it gives us better information about a candidate?

If I'm trying to understand someone's experience, I'd rather hear the example they had time to think through than whichever example their brain managed to retrieve in the first five seconds after I asked the question. And if someone gives me a beautifully prepared answer? Great. Keep asking questions. What did you specifically own? Why did you make that decision? What didn't work? What would you do differently? What happened next? A prepared story can get someone through the first question. It gets much harder to manufacture the details once you start exploring how the work actually happened. That's where the useful information is.

Better Preparation Gives Us Better Evidence

Sharing questions in advance sometimes gets framed as making interviews too easy. I don't think that's what it does. I think it gives us a better opportunity to evaluate what we actually came there to evaluate.

A businesswoman, dressed in a superhero-themed outfit, presents complex data charts during an evening meeting in a dimly lit office with a city skyline view.

If the purpose of an interview is to understand what someone knows, what they've done, how they think, and how they might approach the work we're hiring them to do, then removing unnecessary obstacles should give us a clearer view of those things. Candidates should know what competencies are being evaluated. They should understand the interview format and who they'll be meeting. They should know generally how their answers will be assessed. We could even show candidates what a complete answer looks like without giving them the substance of the answer itself.

None of this tells someone what to say. It tells them what we're asking them to demonstrate. There is a difference.

There's another benefit: candidates don't have to disclose anything personal to receive that clarity. Someone who needs additional processing time benefits. Someone experiencing interview anxiety benefits. Someone interviewing in a language that isn't their first benefits. Someone who hasn't spent years learning the unwritten rules of corporate interviewing benefits. And frankly, the candidate who doesn't need any of those things benefits too. Clear expectations are useful to almost everyone.

What Are We Actually Trying to Learn?

That's the question I think hiring teams need to ask more often. If thinking quickly under pressure is genuinely essential to the job, evaluate it. If presenting to executives is essential, evaluate it. If persuasion is essential, evaluate it. If navigating ambiguity in real time is essential, evaluate it.

A confident woman, dressed as a superhero, stands poised to reveal her insights. She draws back a curtain to showcase a desk filled with charts and diagrams, embodying the fusion of creativity and analytical prowess under the spotlight of a city skyline.

But if the job primarily requires someone to analyze information, build relationships over time, solve complicated problems, write code, manage projects, recruit talent, design systems, interpret data, or perform any of the hundreds of jobs where instantaneous answers aren't the primary measure of success, why are we allowing instantaneous answers to carry so much weight?

Every part of an interview process should earn its place by telling us something meaningful about the work. Otherwise, we're not necessarily selecting the person most capable of doing the job. We're selecting the person most capable of performing our selection process. Those aren't always the same person.

After more than a decade of watching exceptional candidates stumble and polished candidates sail through, I think that's a distinction worth reconsidering. The goal of interviewing shouldn't be to discover who can impress us fastest. It should be to understand, as accurately as we reasonably can, who can actually do the work.

So I ask hiring managers again... are we hiring the best candidate or the best interview performer?

-rkc

I wrote about interview prep on linkedin in 2023.