[lcw]

I think structured interviews can be just as easily biased as unbiased. I'm not disagreeing necessarily about being structured with your interview practices, but I find this to be a grey area with promotions also.

As soon as people figure out the check boxes or the structured pointing system they start to check all the boxes, but it doesn't necessarily speak to the nuances between individuals that make them diverse and both valuable. In fact it can lead to a certain type of person people hired or promote, which can be on good characteristics, but I find many times turns into a "certain type" of person.

I guess what I'm saying is structure can take you so far, but you have to be willing to explore a little bit about what makes a person special, and that many times means not controlling the whole interview, and be willing to have your bias challenged through the candidate directing some of it.

[dimal]

Agreed. It's very demoralizing to know that you are extremely capable of doing the job, but since you don't satisfy the narrowly defined fitness function you're being passed into, you fail. But more than that, companies are missing out on great people that may simply have a different way of thinking that isn't accounted for in their structure.

[randomswede]

My take-away from interviewing is that as a candidate, getting a "you did not get the job" doesn't change anything. Since I've had the privilege of mostly being employed while interviewing for new jobs, this is a "meh, status quo" thing. Nothing changes, I have no decisions to make. If I get an offer, I have a decision to make.

Does it sting when I get a "No"? Yes, a little, but I did my best and (presumably) someone else did better. So, I take solace in that I did not have to make a (relatively large) decision.

[Groxx]

I've also been kinda curious about the research in favor of structured interviews, because as far as I've seen they're generally drawing their conclusions based on "interviewer-predicted performance" vs "actual performance".

How the heck do you measure actual, repeatable performance? Or skill? Income / promotions / etc is very frequently a horrifically biased metric, for similar reasons to interviews, and we have much larger mountains of evidence showing that to be the case. It seems like there's a pretty good chance these studies are just measuring relative bias between interviewers and the interviewee's management, and concluding interviews are done poorly when they disagree with management. i.e. "structured interviews force people to think more like managers" rather than "structured interviews more accurately measure skill".

Using one bad measuring tool to conclude another tool is bad seems... problematic at best. I will grant that "interviews should measure what managers measure" is often what businesses want in bulk, but that does not seem like a particularly good thing to me.

[Scubabear68]

In another comment I was also poking some holes into the “structured” comments, what you say above was in my head but I couldn’t quite articulate it. Well said.

I think checklist interviews miss the mark as you say. You may not have a perfect rubric, but I’m not grading students on a history exam; I am evaluating them for a role in a given position. In the limited time we have to speak, I want to use my intuition and experience as an interviewer and engineer to rapidly get to where the candidate is strong, and where they may have issues.