Reading this again, it was more confrontational than I wanted it to be and lacked details about why I think super structured interviews are a bad idea. Some of

Reading this again, it was more confrontational than I wanted it to be and lacked details about why I think super structured interviews are a bad idea. Some of the best candidates I’ve been involved with hiring have been compelling for reasons you’d never get to in a very structured way. For instance, a candidate who was just out of university. They were very shy about technical topics, and their tech depth wasn’t great. They went to a university in Africa that I knew taught people more stuff that was wrong than right, and they were starting at a disadvantage. To get him out of his shell I asked about things he’d done outside of academics. He told me that he had not done much because he was very busy. Busy with what? Oh, just starting a real estate investing side business with his family where he’d been responsible for their international expansion into the UK. With no finance background, he’d spent his time understanding the financial, legal and tax implications of their expansion and successfully launched in his third year of university. And I’d done a bit of finance so we talked about concepts there and he was able to walk me through complex topics in simple terms. My job for that interview was judging bias for action, curiosity, and diving deep into metrics. He couldn’t show that for tech because he went to a horrible university and had been very busy with other extra circulars. He apologized to me for spending so much time talking about non tech subjects. And here is the problem: people who are bad at interviewing are punished by rigid processes. There’s a lot of data to show that women and immigrants from certain backgrounds are more reserved on average. You have to be a much better interviewer to pull off a structured interview that lets these candidates shine.