Maybe this is a dumb disqualifying example, but if you’re hiring someone who has worked for the government for the last 20 years on classified projects, this whole method has to be thrown out the window.
I think it depends. A careful reading of the classification guides might let a candidate discuss a lot of technical details.
OTOH, I'd hate to be in a position where I had to think carefully about every aspect of that stuff during an interview. Even if nobody noticed an inadvertent classified spill, it could still suck.
No. You may not even talk around the topics. This explicitly comes with the training. Anyone asks me about my last job, I don’t really state much more than what the job title was and what the job postings said for the role I applied to.
I work with people who have worked on various classified projects in years past. Once in a while someone will mention something about the project they read in a newspaper and they have to say "It is obviously unclassified now but because I wasn't explicitly told that is was no longer classified I am not allowed to talk about it" - then they change the subject.
Yeah, I was once at an Apple interview and they couldn't tell me what I'd be working on if they hired me (I assume it was a mobile robot, as my background is in robotics motion planning). I politely left the interview after the third one tried to keep me in the dark and insist whatever it was it was world changing and bigger than iPhone. To me, job interviews are a two-way street, but they wanted to assess me while not allowing me to assess them, so I felt like they had wasted my time.
In some fairness to them, getting your specific job is less important than avoiding a lawsuit from Apple’s rather aggressive legal department.
I definitely empathize with your perspective. Simultaneously, I can also see how it would be most ideally fair to candidates to have some method of evaluating them without relying on intimate details of recent job experience.
E.g., let’s pretend that Steve Wozniak took 5 years off to raise children, are you going to pass him up because he has no job experience from the last 5 years? You’d be well within your rights to, but as a hiring manager I want to choose the best candidate, not the candidate with the best resume.
OTOH, I'd hate to be in a position where I had to think carefully about every aspect of that stuff during an interview. Even if nobody noticed an inadvertent classified spill, it could still suck.