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Comment by EhsanEtezad | Hacker News Reader

I am doing my PhD in Organizational Psychology so let me add here:

The title is misleading a bit. The predictor power of an interview changes as a company gets better at doing interviews.

What do I mean by getting better? (1) Asking the same questions (2) Having a BARS scale for scoring, which means you define the characteristics of a good response versus bad response before interviewing anyone (3) Interviewers received training to do this job impartially (4) Everyone on the interview panel agrees they don't make decisions just based on gut feeling! or saying I have a good feeling about this person!

To summarize, Interview is okay if it's done correctly - It's not great though but not doing interviews have its problems/biases too :)

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"Interview is okay if it's done correctly"

IMHO and experience, it is rarely, if ever, done correctly. Most of the interview process now is a popularity contest, including how attractive you are, whether or not the team likes you, if you're physically fit, and a bread basket of other criteria that has very little to do with the actual job. And if you have a disability, it can be a dehumanizing and discriminatory process. It reminds me of orchestra selection, and how separating judgement of personal traits of a person (age, race, gender, etc.) from the "interview" process led to more diverse people selected for the orchestra.

Would it be better to move the interview process away from the team and the managers involved, and instead have a separate department do all of the interviewing and hiring? I think that could cut down on the popularity poisoning, but maybe also give people who have a disability but otherwise excellent skill set, a chance.

https://jamesboldin.com/2011/07/27/malcolm-gladwells-blink-p...

No. I have specific behavioral and technical traits I’m looking for when building a team. I want to be able to do the interviews

Popularity contest can be very rational though, when unpopular candidates that are winning in other metrics lead to your existing team looking elsewhere. Or worse: only the subset of your existing team that easily finds other employment.

That's how large corporations in non-knowledge work areas used to hire for decades. For knowledge work the results were not great, hence the new approach. It doesn't seem to be perfect either, so let's iterate. I have no clue how...

Lots of the big tech companies do interviews with randos first and then do a “team match” round if the candidate passes. I don’t see how it helps with disabilities.

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