At my last workplace, we had an interesting approach to interviewing candidate in person. We focused on personal compatibility more than technical skills. Our t

At my last workplace, we had an interesting approach to interviewing candidate in person. We focused on personal compatibility more than technical skills. Our team view was that technical skills can be taught/learnt but social and emotional maturity is hard to teach and learn. This philosophy wasn't unique to the company just to our team. We typically will have 4-5 hour day setup for series of interviews, preferably before lunch and during lunch. By this time remote team workers already have interviewed the candidate on phone and shared their impression to boss. First interview and last interview was by the Boss, in between we alternated between junior and senior members of the team as well as a few people from teams that we closely worked with in our job. Each interview lasted 30-45 minutes. Everyone was free to structure and cover whatever they wanted to explore during the interview. There were no prescribed method or feedback forms. We provided verbal feedback to the boss as we walked by his cubicle after the interview. The typical feedback was "S/he reminds me of XYZ or s/he is strange or something along these lines, sometime politically incorrect." The XYZ typically being a current or ex-team worker or someone we all have/had known. Sometime we will have little bit more to say but not much. The feedback typically ended with "thumbs up," "thumbs down," or "thumbs sideways". Even though, we schedule one person to take the candidate out for lunch, by the time lunch comes around, boss has pretty good guess whether candidate is hirable or not. If he is getting consistent thumbs up, we decide to take him out for lunch with the whole team. During the lunch, there is no discussion about interview or questioning candidate, just having a good time and treating the candidate as one of the team member. Of course everyone enjoys as we go for lunch to a nicer place and it is on company dime. We continue the scheduled interviews after the lunch. Once interviews are over, we huddle for a quick 15 minute meeting with remote team members on the conference call and comment on the candidate. By that evening or early next morning boss lets everyone know the hiring decision he made.