[jrx]

I can share with you one hiring insight I have that goes against your sentiment. I've been hiring for hedge fund research roles for the last three years interviewing ~30 candidates over that period.

What I've learned is that it is a very weak signal to talk to candidate about "their research" unless it's immediately and directly applicable to what we were doing as a company, so that we can talk about it as equal experts, which never really happened in our case. Previous research done by candidate was, like research almost always is in a narrow and specialize niche. Every candidate I was talking to was very good with talking about their research and from my perspective at the time of the interview it was impossible to validate and evaluate their claims. That conversation could convey the character of the candidate but I couldn't evaluate their ability to do new research.

Instead, presenting candidates with the same problem, that in our case took around 3 hours to solve, in our case proved a good way to compare candidates a bit more objectively and test how they approach solving problems they haven't seen before which is more applicable to what they'll be doing on the job.

The downside of that process is that during three hours you can only test so much, but hiring is a really hard thing to do right and we didn't want to take more of candidates time as we did value it highly and found that to be the sweet spot for us.

[Traster]

The upside of asking candidates about their research is it does a good job of verifying what their contribution is in often highly collaborative environments. Too often I've seen candidates who've worked on super exciting stuff, but not actually been the key contributor. This is way more common in junior roles though.

[denzil_correa]

> That conversation could convey the character of the candidate but I couldn't evaluate their ability to do new research.

It all depends on the questions asked to the candidate. You don't ask them about their research which is publicly available in any case. You ask them questions that let them reveal their thought process about their research. Now, it's up to the interviewer to come up with good questions to make this happen. The interviewer has to be well prepared and think about questions. You don't need to be an expert to ask good questions.

I'd like to reiterate that this applies to research/scientific position where pushing the boundaries is a crucial aspect of the job. In case you are looking for a very specific skillset, things may be different.