[kasey_junk]

Its fairly easy to see how this correlation breaks down. It is almost a truism that someone who is good at communicating with a wide range of people, is likely to make that wide range of people think they are more technically competent than people who aren't good at communicating with a wide range of people. Especially given the virtually random nature who you will communicate with during any given interview cycle.

But, its quite possible for people who are not naturally able to communicate with a wide range of people to be able to communicate with a smaller subset (say people they are more comfortable with, or people working on similar problems to them).

The more interesting question is, could those people who communicate less broadly, in a situation where they do communicate well, perform technically at the same level (or better) as people who are more natural communicators?

Another way to say this is, evaluating interviews is fairly prone to bias towards people who interview well. As someone who is hiring I'd be much more enthused about their results if it correlated to job performance, not hiring results. Its almost gospel at this point that there are people in software who interview well who do not make good hires, but the methodology of this article doesn't talk about this at all.

All told, nothing about this research is persuasive to me on my opinion of "interviews are largely worthless in determining who will be a good hire".