[Tangurena]

Under the Human Capital approach, learning via books or free/cheap online courses has the same effect as learning at the most expensive school. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_capital

Under the Signalling Theory approach, going to an expensive university is a stronger "signal" to prospective employers. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_theory

These 2 show wildly different results when you consider the difference between forgetting a subject and failing the subject. You may know just as much as another person, but the one of you that passes some hurdle signals to prospective employers that the hurdle passer is the better candidate. This is because hiring a person is trying to predict future behavior/success with limited information, and many people use signals as heuristics. http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2012/02/the_career_cons....

One dissertation that described some of these differences is called "Hiring and inequality in elite professional service firms". An interesting read, and it explains some of the "unfairness" of employers using signalling instead of the human capital model. http://books.google.com/books/about/Hiring_and_inequality_in...

[carbocation]

When I hire someone, I typically only get access to their resume. If I wanted to try to reduce my own signal-based-bias and apply the Human Capital theory, should I instead ask for their transcript, and perhaps have someone else remove the name of the institution before I see the transcript?

[Tangurena]

My suspicion is that you may want to move away from trivia based questions (what is the 3rd parameter of the form.print dialog, or how would you move Mt Fuji) to ones like "describe a situation where you inspired others to meet a common goal" or "Describe a situation when the quality of work you completed wasn't the highest quality it could have been. What were the circumstances and what did you learn?".

Competency based interviewing is a bit harder, since you first have to figure out what the actual job competencies are and then base some questions around them. The questions won't have "correct" answers, instead they help you - the interviewer - determine how the interviewee thinks/makes decisions and you can then decide how they'll fit into your organization.

In addition, you may want to look at their resume and tailor one or 2 questions based on what they did at companyX. The PDF linked below should give you some idea of what sort of questions to ask.

One book that may be of interest: http://www.amazon.com/Competency-Based-Interviews-Master-Int...

Some example questions: https://sharepoint.sandiego.edu/hr/Employment/CompetencyInte...

Website with some explanation and examples: http://www.wikijob.co.uk/wiki/competency-based-interview

Wikipedia articles: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Situation,_Task,_Action,_Result

[alextgordon]

These questions are only suitable for interviewing politicians. That is, they just test someone's ability to bullshit convincingly. Subjective questions take a long time to think though: more time than is available in an interview. Hence, no answers you will get will be useful in any way.

The example questions are also excessively wordy and written in euphemisms.

[Drbble]

STAR interviewing just selects for talented bullshitters. An interview should be novel questions about someone's skill and experience, not a canned sales pitch.