[paulcole]

As an interviewer, I guess I just don’t get that at all.

Interviews are the opportunity to meet an interesting person, learn about them, talk about their interests, and sell them on the chance to work at your company.

How could that be boring and repetitive?

[michaelt]

Imagine your company has a multi-stage interview, your job is to do the whiteboard coding part, and your pool of known-to-be-of-equal-difficulty questions is very small.

You also know that, when people are thinking through a challenging problem in a stressful situation, they mostly won't want to engage in small talk at the same time. Although you can give them hints and ask questions at appropriate times.

It's easy enough to imagine how that could get tiresome, once you've done enough that no solution or mistake is new to you.

[cthalupa]

>Interviews are the opportunity to meet an interesting person, learn about them, talk about their interests, and sell them on the chance to work at your company.

And all of that is a great way to introduce a ton of unconscious bias into your interviewing process. You should be spending your time in the interview focusing on determining if the candidate meets the requirements to do the job. Being interesting, having interests you find interesting, etc. are presumably not requirements for the position you're interviewing them for. When you find out they have (or do not have) shared interests with you, as a human being, you're wired introduce bias into your decision making process, whether you intend to or not.

Interviews SHOULD be boring in the repetitive sense. The interview should be tailored to the position, and not the person you're interviewing.

[paulcole]

Should’ve clarified: Professional interests.

> Interviews SHOULD be boring in the repetitive sense

Repetitive isn’t boring. I believe it’s very possible (essential) for a good interviewer to see the difference.

[burlesona]

This is a fair critique, but as sibling commenters pointed out, a well-structured interview is highly repetitive by design, so that every candidate for a particular role gets as close as possible to the same interview experience. When you’ve done dozens or hundreds of these it becomes kind of like mind-reading, you just know what the person is thinking and roughly what they’re going to say and do for the next 45 minutes based on what they do in the first 5. And yes, sometimes, that can get boring.

But your point is valid in the sense that, as an interviewer, I do try to bring energy and interest to each interview, both because it’s what the candidate deserves and it’s better for me too.

And to be clear, most interviews are interesting and enjoyable, even the sessions I’ve done a hundred times. But, just being realistic, neither I nor the candidates are always on our A game, and sometimes the result is a quiet and dull interview.

And to be clear, that may still result in an offer recommendation! Some of these interviews are dry because the candidate knows the material down pat, doesn’t want to chit chat, and has no questions. Those are, in fact, the very kind of person I imagine would improve their performance by smiling and asking what I had for lunch :)