A person who time-traveled from an office in 1955 to today's corporate workplace would be flabbergasted by Slack groups, standing desks, and downright suspicious of team offsite meetings on Zoom. But drop them in front of a candidate who is sitting behind a desk at 9 am in a freshly ironed shirt, and they will know precisely what is going on. "Well, hello," they will say, holding a fountain pen over their writing pad, "why don't you tell me about yourself?"
The job interview has become the cockroach of workplace rituals. It outlived the necktie, the open office, the transition to remote work, and even the end of the annual review process. Almost everything else has been digitized, decentralized, or eliminated, except for this ritual, which continues much as it always has, with little change even since the days of the typewriter and the three-martini lunch.
A brief, slightly embarrassing history
The current hiring tests and processes we use across the globe originated from Thomas Edison, who, in 1921, got fed up hiring college men with little to no qualifications. So, he came up with a general knowledge test comprising about 150 questions, which caused quite a stir across the country. The New York Times published several articles about it, and even Albert Einstein, who happened to visit the U.S. that year, found himself outsmarted by one of its questions regarding the speed of sound waves.
After that, the interview process has made very little progress. In the 1970s, an industrial psychologist invented the behavioral interview, the "Tell me about a time when" technique, relying on the idea that people tend to repeat themselves.
By the 1980s, the STAR technique (Situation, Task, Action, Result) became an established practice that every recruiter now uses. And after that, nothing new happened for nearly four decades in the recruiting space.
Until now, the most widely used model of recruitment is when a recruiter asks a candidate some questions, the candidate responds confidently, and a third person makes a decision based on a forty-minute conversation.
The Part where the Data gets Awkward
The process was not built without faults. But over time, these faults let unqualified candidates into the system while good candidates were overlooked.
The Schmidt and Hunter series of meta-analyses has been tested over and over again since 1998, and has shown that unstructured interviews, the most common type, are poor predictors of job performance, with validity coefficients in the 0.2 range.
Work samples, structured interviews, and cognitive ability tests are far stronger predictors, yet most companies still lean on the unstructured chat. Former People Operations Director at Google, Laszlo Bock, went as far as to say that their popular brainteaser questions ("How many golf balls can you fit in a school bus?") were "a complete waste of time" and told "absolutely nothing."
But that’s not even the worst part of the process.
The truth is that interviewers make up their minds about candidates within the first few minutes, sometimes even in the first few seconds, and then rationalize why for the next 30 minutes. For every available corporate position, out of 250 applicants, only four or six are called in for interviews.
On average, time to hire in the US takes about 44 days, based on industry reports, making the whole process longer than the Apollo 11 mission.
Recruiters spend so much time filtering out hundreds of candidates from resumes, subject a few to a process that takes longer than a trip to the moon, and finally assess them with a process that is about as accurate as tossing a coin.
So why hasn't the process changed?
It’s all about inertia, really. Hiring managers have themselves been interviewed before, and they are likely to reproduce a ritualistic process that they have gone through. Human resource departments are very conservative in nature; “this is how we’ve always done it” is a professional haven. Candidates, on the other hand, are often suspicious of any other type of interview process than the traditional one because of the belief (not always unfounded) that this is an attempt to cut costs instead of making things fairer.
The soft reason is that it is theatrical. Interviewing is an elaborate performance on both sides: the candidate plays out their polished image and enthusiasm, while the company pretends that it is an honor to be allowed to interview with them. There definitely is some kind of magic in this ritual, except that it is a magic that serves its own purpose, not the one that it is supposed to serve.
The slow, quiet thaw
But change is slowly creeping from the sidelines. Skill-based hiring is becoming popular, with companies like IBM, Accenture, and more making degrees optional for many positions. Work samples, video interviews, and standardized scoring methods are becoming more common. A new generation of hiring tools is pushing organizations to adopt a more structured approach to evaluation, less gut feeling, more data-driven signal.
The interview likely isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. People tend to want to know the person they are forced to spend forty hours a week with. But whatever form it takes moving forward might finally resemble the current era rather than the one it originated in back in 1955.