The Job Interview - What is your favourite vegetable?

Episode Overview: In today’s episode, we’re diving deep into one of the most common hiring practices: the job interview. Is it the best way to decide who to hire, or is it time for a change? We’ll explore the history of interviews, their effectiveness, and why they might not always be the best tool for hiring decisions.

Key Topics:

• The Interview Process
  We discuss the most widely used interview types today—behavioral and lightly structured interviews—and whether they’re as effective as we think they are.
• The Historical Context
  Where did interviews come from? How did they evolve post-WW2 and through the rise of technology-driven recruitment?
• Are Interviews Effective?
  We’ll look at the validity of interviews, citing studies like Schmidt and Hunter’s 1998 research that show a 0.44 validity. We’ll also explore how interviews empower hiring managers, foster trust in the process, and offer a “universal” system.
• Who Succeeds in Interviews?
  It turns out interviews might not be as objective as we’d like to think. Traits like extroversion, articulate speech, and likability (often tied to appearance and confidence) can give candidates an unfair advantage, thanks to confirmation bias.
• The Typical Interview Questions
  From asking about weaknesses (where most candidates humble-brag) to questions like “Where do you see yourself in 5 years?”—we dig into why these questions are asked, and whether they’re actually helping us make better hiring decisions.
• The Pitfalls of Interviews
  Why can’t we compare candidates effectively? We talk about how bias, ‘fit,’ and likeability play a larger role in hiring decisions than they should, and how untrained interviewers tend to “wing it.”
• What’s the Solution?
  Could mandatory interviewer training, structured interviews with standard questions, or even work tests be better alternatives? We explore these options and the pros and cons of each.
• The Bottom Line
  Is the traditional interview process outdated? Should we be looking for a new way to hire talent, or is the interview here to stay?

Takeaways:

• Interviews may not be the most objective way to hire, but they remain a widely accepted practice.
• Bias, overconfidence, and lack of interviewer training are all factors that undermine the effectiveness of interviews.
• Structured interviews, training for interviewers, and skill assessments could be potential solutions to make the hiring process more fair and accurate.

Is This Idea Worth Binning?
We wrap up by asking whether it’s time to throw the traditional interview process out the window—or if it’s still worth keeping.

Listen Now: Don't miss this thought-provoking conversation on rethinking the hiring process. Tune in for insights on how to make hiring decisions better and more efficient!

If you have any Dedx suggestions email us at team@samsas.one with the subject line Dedx Idea.

We would love to hear them!

John: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jadm/

Anna: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anna-wesson-54989929/

Music credit: by Yevhen Onoychenko from Pixabay

Disclaimer: The ideas discussed in this podcast are intended for entertainment purposes only and should not be taken as serious business advice. Listeners are encouraged to do their own research and seek professional advice before implementing any of the ideas discussed.

Transcript

 Hi, welcome to Dedx. I'm here today with Anna. Hi, Anna.  

Hello. 

And we're here to talk about the interview,  the  omnipresent topic in the business world.  So,  

yeah, and I'm really excited to have this conversation today because I think the interview is something that just about everybody has experienced in one shape or another.

And because job interviews are so ubiquitous, we all have an opinion, whether we are more usually the interviewer or the interviewee, we probably have a view. And I think that means that the conversation today is really interesting.  

So we're going to dive in and pick through what's happening in the interview.

So where do we want to kick off?  

Well, I, I guess, you know, in terms of, in terms of the, the Dedex principle,  the fact that we're going to arrive on whether this is an idea worth keeping or an idea worth bidding really is determined by what, what we're talking about and, and what specifically we mean when we're talking about interviews, because interviews are not all created equal.

Yeah. I 

think it's fair to say. 

Definitely.  

Well, and to that end. The bit that we are going to be thinking about today is the unstructured interview. What, what is known in, in a lot of the behavioral science as behavioral based unstructured interviews. And that's important to, to be clear about because what we're not talking about is a technical interview.

You know, unquestionably that there are some different things at play. in those. And so, we're talking about the ones where, where they, they, there isn't really a plan, you know, it's a, let's have a conversation. Let's get to know each other. Let's, you know, ask some questions and try and feel each other out a little bit.

There will be some chat about the job and capabilities, but it's really about the, it's about the person a lot of the time, right? 

Sure,. And I think,  And unless you work in the public sector where interviews are very much more structured most of us have experienced a an unstructured interview and they're kind of random.

They're very random depending on who you get as the interviewee. 

Yeah, unquestionably. And I think the important thing is that  They have face validity. People think that they are an effective way to choose people, that they will get you the best outcome from a pool of candidates based on, you know, what you find out in an interview, what you get to know.

And I think,  go on. I would say that's kind of the, the, the,  you know, that's the folklore, right? Everyone thinks that there has to be an interview. Interview is part of the process. It's the final step  in that process. Okay. Right, right, right. And interestingly possibly interestingly I did discover in thinking about this that actually legally, it's not, there is no obligation for an interview.

You know, legally you can appoint somebody  on, on all sorts of bases and as long as you can justify the process and, you know, go through all the legal loops  and, and hoops that you've got to jump through, you don't have to have an interview.  

Which would be true, I mean, if you think about the academic world of when you apply to university, for example,  there are some universities where you have to interview, but the vast majority of them you don't interview before you, you know, they commit to you for three to five years. 

So it is, you know, I think it's, you know, there is, there is.  There's certainly precedent for getting something without the interview process. We don't, we don't see it very much in the professional world and I wonder, I wonder why that is.  

Let's, let's dive into this topic a bit more and maybe, maybe some of that will become clear.

Thinking about this in terms of why we've arrived at this process in this current moment. Where did interviews come from, John? What's your, what's your understanding of, of why we have interviews today?  

 Like many of the topics that we've talked about, the the interview has come about over the 20th century.

So, you know, from a very informal  economy into the industrial revolution, late 1800s into the, into the 1900s, as the industrial environment started to take over from agriculture, there was a need for people, to enter the industrial world and they had to have a set of skills to be able to do the job.

So actually the, the interview started back then as a way originally of making sure that people were capable enough to do the job. So,  you know, a lot of the times that might've originally been physically capable,  

right? Where are they going to be 

strong enough? Where are they going to be big enough? Are they going to be able to handle that amount of work?

And then also interestingly enough.  intellectually capable. So, you know, back in the 1920s, General Electric you know, they, they had  intelligence tests, they had problem solving as part of their interview process to try and get people that they felt were going to be ideally. Now that kind of disappeared a little bit.

As we progress through the century and much more behavioral approach started to take over. So  we've touched on what that is, but  behavioral approaches, does this person fit? Does, do we want, you know, do we want this person on our team? Do they have the right behavior skills, personality  to fit in with us?

And  And we haven't, we haven't touched on it yet, but that's also where psychometrics starts to, to come into play. In a previous podcast, we've talked quite a lot about that, but how do you, you know, how do you profile people to see where they're going to fit? So yeah, so behavioral interview, that's where we're going today.

That is still very prevalent. As we as we look to the future we're seeing much more technology based stuff. We're seeing AI making lots of decisions about people before they even get to the interview process. So who knows, who knows where it's going to go, but let's, let's stay focused on the fun topic of the behavioral interview.

Yeah, and, and let's definitely stay focused on the interviews themselves because they are still key, right? Absolutely,  just about every job, certainly kind of professional jobs and, and jobs with seniority always have interviews still, you know, it's a really baked in part of our selection process. Yeah, and 

I think we've innovated a lot.

So there's been a lot of innovation around the recruitment process  Has there been much innovation around the interview? Let's, let's wait and see. 

Eh, eh. 

Eh, eh. Unlikely. 

Okay.  

Are they any good? What do you think, Anna? 

Are they any good?  A qualified,  yes. I mean, they have some validity. That, that's some, some predictive validity about whether people will end up being good.

at the job. Schmidt and Hunter did some work in 1998, compared lots of different recruitment and selection methods, and they found that they had a, a validity of 0. 44  against other methodologies which had, which had higher validities unquestionably. So, so they're not without some redeeming features.

Yeah. I think, They do some, you know, they do have some benefits. For example,  they are a known quantity. If I say to you, John, you want this job, you're going to have to interview for it. You go, okay. I understand what that means. 

I expect that, right? I expect that I'm going to be interviewed for it.  

Indeed.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's quite helpful to know that. 

Terrifying sometimes. Depends. 

Yeah, right. Noted. But, you know, maybe not, not more so than being having some sort of AI assessment. I don't know. You know, I think they empower the hiring manager. So, you know, I'm the hiring manager and I get to pick who's got the right fit for my team.

You know, that feels good for me as the manager. 

As the, as the, as the interviewee, it also gives you an opportunity, I guess, to see what managers look like in that firm. 

Yeah, yeah. So there's, 

so there's a choice on both sides, right? We quite often forget that. We quite often forget. We think it's a one way street, but. 

, certainly over the last couple of years where the job market has been quite tight, people are you know, choosing their employer as much as their employer choosing their employee.  

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, so there is that, that piece about,  about fit. And yet,  and yet, and yet, and yet, I don't think we can say that by any stretch they are universally valuable.

There's a whole ton of reasons why that isn't the case. Let's dive into that. 

There's a biggie though, isn't there? 

What's your, what's Oh my goodness, I was about to say, what's your biggie? You know what I mean?  

Oh wow, I need to make this This needs to be an e podcast,  obviously. Oh. 

You know what I mean.

What, what, what did you have in mind? I've gone bright red. 

Yeah, got bright red. I'm definitely not cutting this bit out in the edit 

because 

people are gonna really enjoy it. 

Sorry, mom. So what, 

what, what I, that's, that's a sorry moment. Two podcasts, one after another. I think what I was talking about was the the inevitable factor of. 

what we see in the statistics about who is successful in interviews. What does it take to be successful in an interview? Who are the most successful candidates and what characteristics do they do they have? And 

And, oh, and isn't this, like, achingly predictable? And, and cringe makingly so in terms of being successful.

 They're articulate, they're extroverted, they're good at connection good social skills. Generally, good looking people do well in interviews, tall people do well in interviews people that are well dressed and, and look the part do well in interviews, and showing up on time definitely doesn't hurt, 

and interestingly, for most jobs,  those skills don't always, aren't always necessary, right? So most jobs don't require you to be well dressed. You know, in order to be successful at that job, you know, you're interviewing to be a, you know, to work in local government,  you know, who actually cares whether you're extrovert, maybe that's not relevant for the job,  but yet that's something that we're using as a selection criteria, either implicitly or explicitly.

And that's a problem. 

And it's just the interviewers. Opinion of  those, right? So it's, it's what do they see? And, and we know that we make decisions about people very quickly in a,  you know, in a, in a microsecond or two. We, we form  an opinion that can be, that can be quite broad about who they are and what they stand for and all these kinds of things.

And then I think, you know, the, the dreaded confirmation bias. We spend the rest of the interview,  or the interviewer spends the rest of the interview looking for confirmation that what they assumed in the beginning is correct. Look, this person is well dressed. They look the part. They must be  600 able to do this.

So, they structure the questions in a way  that might make it easier for that candidate to appear that way.  

Yeah. Yeah, and I'm just I'm just having a memory of my first ever job where I was a baby recruitment consultant, and, and it ought to be said that You were recruiting 

babies? 

I wasn't recruiting babies.

I was just the most junior on the pile of, of Akuma consultants. And I would like to probably also say that I was rubbish. I spent far too much time talking to people and not enough time actually filling jobs. Yeah, sorry to my manager at the time, but I can distinctly remember we were recruiting some IT professional.

I can't, can't remember what the job was. And this guy turned up in bike leathers with a helmet. And was, was just, you know, he might have been the best IT professional necessary, you know, the, the, the best professional out there and yet he just didn't seem to be taking it very seriously. And the company said, absolutely not.

We don't want to, we don't even want to interview him. If he can't turn up dressed properly, we don't want to interview him. And, and, you know, that's, that's the kind of the converse of this.  playing out, isn't it? If you are not dressed properly, and if you don't turn up as the employer is hoping that you, you know, looking as the employer expects you to, That's it kind of game over.

And I do feel like that's been got a lot better in the, the employers are  generally a lot more open minded on those topics. So they, you know, they put more, they put more people into the funnel, you know, it starts wider than it used to, and maybe a few more.  of those people do get to the interview stage.

Hmm. 

But where do they go from there,  right? Right. I don't think too many of them get to the other side of the interview stage.  

And that is exactly my point. This guy got to interview  and then was excluded based on, on what he was wearing. 

Bike leathers. 

Bike leathers and carrying his bike helmet.  Anyway, let's talk about the interview process itself, right?

So you turn up for your interview that you've  tried to prepare for, but it's really difficult because it's going to be an unstructured interview and it's going to go whichever way the wind blows. What might happen? You know, what have you seen? What have you heard? What kind of questions might come up John, in a conversation with a prospective employer?

Yeah. 

All right. Well, I thought it might be fun just to kick around what common wisdom  and LinkedIn, chat, GPT, and, and the internet finds as some of the worst interview questions that are out there, which also happened to be some of the most common interview questions. And I think you'll have heard some.

So  

start 

off with the easy ones. You know, what is your biggest weakness?  Who's going to tell the truth? Who's  Who is going to, in their right mind, is going to tell the truth to that question?  

Well, I mean, the obvious answer is, is that my biggest weakness is I work too hard. I can be so focused on the outcome that, you know, I forget to go home at night.

Or you're a perfectionist. Maybe, you know, you've just got to get it right. I have to get it right.  That's, that's, that's my thing. 

That's your humble brag question, isn't it? 

Yeah, that is the humble brag.  Which, why ask? You know, you know you're going to get an answer that doesn't mean anything. I don't understand the point of asking the question.

And then the opposite of that one, obviously, is what is your greatest strength?  So, you know, if you've done a little bit of homework, if you've had a look at the company's website, you see what goals they they,  are, you know, focused on, if you see something about their values, you know, you can just tailor your answer,  tailor your answer , to meet the need. 

And  it doesn't make sense. Again, what is the, what does the interviewer learn about you  from, from that, the answer to that question?  

Right. And I think that's, that's what we come back to each time, isn't it, that the interview is supposed to  give both parties information that allows them to make better decisions  about, about the suitability for the role. and I think you're saying quite clearly that those questions are not,  not going to give anybody anything except, you know, An opportunity to answer stupid questions.  

Yeah, and in both directions. So it doesn't tell the the candidate anything about the company too. You know, it's a very one sided it's a very one sided approach.

Imagine if you reversed it. Imagine another stupid question that gets asked is, you know, if you were a vegetable, what vegetable would you be? Imagine if you were a candidate and you said to the, to the interviewer, well, yeah. And you know, they said, do you have any questions? And you said, yeah, actually, I do have a question that I'd like to ask you, Mr.

Hiring manager. You know, if you were a vegetable, which vegetable would you like to be? Could you, could you imagine? I mean, right. So if you just, I think a common, I mean, it seems like a good test for a sensible interview question.  Would I be okay with the candidate asking me that question and answering it? 

If the answer to that is no, that would be ridiculous. Then I think you should, you should think again about the question. 

Okay, so let's put this to the test, John.  You've done lots of interviews over your you know, couple of years in business. What's your favorite go to interview question?  What question do you ask? 

You're putting me on the spot now, aren't you? 

Huh.  

So, I  mean, the question that I used to ask all the time, which, you know, is probably not a great question either, is, I would ask people,  you know,  what would you do if you won the lottery?  

Mm hmm.  

Why would I ask them that? Because I just wanted to gauge how honest they were going to be  about the answer.

Or if they were just going to give me some ridiculous I'm going to stay at work and work forever and all this kind of stuff.  I don't think it's, I mean, looking back on it just now, it feels kind of naive and a bit silly. But at the time I thought, okay, that's an interesting, that's an interesting approach.

And, and does it pass your reverse questioning test? If you were asked that by an interviewee.  So John, what's your perspective on winning the lottery? What?  Would you raise an eyebrow or two? Or would you think Okay, legit, legit question. 

Yeah, I don't think it would pass the test yeahinteresting.  I think it would flunk the test. 

So I 

think your test is better than your question.  

Definitely The question's rubbish,  , the question is rubbish. 

Oh, interesting. 

But I think that's the point, maybe the point is questions in an interview are rubbish  and it's not questions that should be taking place. It's  You know, it's something else. 

Hold that thought.  

Hold that thought, because I think we're going to come back to that. 

We are going to come back to that.  

But listen,  help me.  Why do we even bother to interview like this? It strikes me that, you know, we're going through the motions.  I'm asking, I'm the interviewer asking you, the candidate, some kind of stupid questions that you don't know, you know, are going to relate to the job.

They all just seem a bit random. Why bother? Why don't we just, you know, sack it off? Why, why are we still going down this route? You got a view?  

So I think taking a different approach requires, you  change in the organization. It requires the hiring managers  to to take more risk to, you know, they're, they're right now, the hiring manager is effective, effectively getting to say, this is the person I would like, cause they're going to fit in my team. 

And if you go to a different process, maybe a process that's more skills based or a process that's more audition or trial based, the results are going to change. And maybe hiring managers are going to lose a bit of you know, lose a bit of power and control over that process. So that's one thing that springs to mind.

Dystopian. Yeah. Okay. 

So I, 

I hear that. 

Go on. What do you, what do you got? You got one from me. 

 Yeah. I mean, I, I think there's partly this kind of misguided belief that this stuff works, you know, interviews work.  I think. Interviewers overestimate their ability to make good decisions.  You know, I'm a great judge of character.

Oh my days, if I heard that one more time. You know, you're not. You're not because you're a human being. 

You know, 

actually being a judge of character is incredibly challenging. And we're all rubbish. So, so absorb that. I think people don't understand their bias.  You know, and, and  they should, but that, but they don't.

And so the bias gets perpetuated without  people really doing that on purpose. I mean, yeah, sure, sometimes it's on purpose, but, but often I don't think it is. And I think without the kind of self awareness and believing that they are good at it, interviewers make loads of mistakes unwittingly.  

And I think there can be a little I mean, laziness is too strong a word, but. 

Maybe there's not a ton of prep taking place when you are the interviewer.  Oh, I'm doing some interviews. You know, I've got some interviews coming up this afternoon. You know, have you been trained? Do you treat them all the same? Or do you just, you know, do you stroll in and have a nice chat and see what you can learn?

Maybe you've got a little scrap of paper, you know, that you make your own little assessment. and add up, you know, they were whatever out of  five on this topic and this topic. So maybe, you know, maybe you've got your own little structure, but  it doesn't feel  well prepared, well executed for such a big decision, right?

You're, you're gonna, you're gonna bring this person into your organization, their life's gonna change, they're gonna have an impact within your organization. So yeah. 

And, and in defensive managers, there's a lot of fatigue that goes on, right? It's time consuming, potentially quite boring. It's frustrating to interview and to interview regularly. 

And I think, you know, because it takes up a lot of time, maybe people don't invest the energy and time in it that they should,  I make no apologies for that. But I think it's important to note that  people are tired, you know, because the jobs market now moves fast, people change jobs regularly.

Interviewing has become much more  important as, as a, as, as a kind of managerial responsibility,  and that's, challenging in terms of finding the time and the energy to do that. And certainly I think  over the pandemic where, you know, there was certainly skill shortages in some areas, you know, you saw people interviewing all the time, you know, two interviews a week.

And that's exhausting.  

But it's a skill, right? It's something that people should be should be trained and assessed on their ability to their ability to interview. And  it's a key part of the role. And I don't see that  happening. I don't see people taking responsibility for it as such a key element of their job.

I think 

there's a bit of.  I'm pretty good at this. Yeah, I know it. Maybe people are overconfident or they're underconfident and they just have their kind of go to strategy of this is what this is what I'm going to do. But there's, there's, there's very little  assessment of.

 Are we good at interviewing? Are we, are we good at doing this? So, I mean, I think HR has done,  and HR teams have done, there's been a lot of work done on the front end of recruitment. How we get people into the funnel, how we get diverse candidates, how we move them through the process. But in the end, it all comes down to this interview that takes place at the end. 

A lot of it, decision making takes place there. It feels like there could be more focus.  There. Hmm. Yeah. I hear you.  Okay, and this creates problems, right? Yeah. You know, having interviews as the final stage.  It's not something that,  that is, is is without the challenges that it kind of kicks up.

And I think, you know, bias is the biggest one there. You know, bias is so baked in  that interviews are a problem.  But it's a topic people don't want to hear about, right? Bias is I mean, I don't think it's you know, it's, it's, it's a topic that has  Yeah, that's a bit marmite,  organizations, and yeah, I don't know. 

And, and, well, and if that's the case, right, and if, if, if your hypothesis is right, people don't want to hear about bias, then the process and the system has to be bias free so that you exclude the sort of self reflective piece about what's the bias that I might bring to this. 

You  

have to design a better process.

Yeah. 

So when you say bias, I think that, I think there is you know, there could be a good focus around, you know, understanding some of the cognitive bias  that takes place, like confirmation bias. But I think when you say bias in corporate settings, people automatically jump to racial and gender and all, you know, those topics that,  that, you know, they, they, they don't want to feel that they're being blamed for something.

So I think bias can be quite a,  

Oh, it's a, it's a hot button, isn't it? It's a 

hot button for like, and they don't hear, they don't hear what we're talking about. So I almost think you should rebrand it. Some of those cognitive biases, that's something else. 

Yeah. And I take that point, but there are also the non cognitive biases.

That, that kick in in, in the interview process, you know, the, the fact that we interview and you know, most people like people like them, 

you 

know, that's, that's absolutely the case. That's not to do with your cognitive bias. That's to do with the fact that, you know, I would rather work with people who,  no, I like to hope that I wouldn't, but you know, we would like to work with people who are like us. 

Yeah. 

And that, you know, that's a problem. 

Well, you like to work with me and I'm not like you. 

That's true. You're definitely not like me.  So many ways. In fact,  why do we work together again?  

Totally. I think that is that is spot on. So how do you.  You know, how do you put some guidelines in place so that you are you know, that you're aware of that.

So interview, interviewers are aware of that. And, and whose responsibility is it to, to make them aware of those things? Typically it would be HR. How strong is HR's voice? How big is HR's voice?  A lot of the time managers are looking for someone to fill a seat on their team and the rest of their team is overworked.

They've got two empty spots. They want to fill somebody, fill, fill one of the spots. They've got five people to choose from. They want to get an offer out and guess what? They're going to, there's going to be a probation period of three months or six months for this person. So even if they get it wrong you know, they get a second chance. 

The decision's not final.  

And, and isn't that particularly the case where the budget for recruitment sits outside your department?  

Yeah. So let's just keep it going. Let's, you know, yeah, exactly. Absolutely.  So the decisions. Yeah. So.  Yeah, sometimes the cost of getting it wrong the cost of recruitment might, might sit somewhere else.

So you can be a little bit relaxed about it. 

Yeah, you can take it, take more of a chance. I hear that. 

Yeah. 

Well, you know, let's, let's imagine, let's imagine that actually interviews or these kind of unstructured interviews  are not a great idea. They're something that, that we should think about binning.

We should, we should be dead X ing. Is there an alternative or are we kind of stuck with this?  

I think there are alternatives. 

Brilliant.  Discuss. What are they? Discuss alternatives. 

My favourite alternative is always the random selection of qualified candidates.  

What, like, as in, as in you have six people, they're all qualified, and you just go,  Choose number four. 

Okay, you get them, you get them and do an 

assessment. They do the assessment. You know, they do, they do tasks that are relevant to the job that they're going to do. If they're in customer service, you get them to do, you know, if it's, if they're going to be talking to clients, you get them to talk to clients and you assess, do they do they meet the requirement?

 And then you go from there.  Okay, so, so, I hear in there that it's not simply the completely random choice. You have actually worked out that they can all do the job by an objective measure, that objective measure being the work test. Yeah, the work test. There has to be a work test. So they have to be capable of doing the job.

So if we go back to the original history piece.  You know, you wouldn't hire someone who wasn't strong enough to, you know, to go down the mine and push the coal up. So you've, they've got to have the, you know, they've got to have, they've got to be able to do the job.  Yeah. And you've got to have tested, you've got to have tested and they've got to be able to demonstrate that they have the skills to deliver on the work that is being required. 

Excellent. And actually, if we're going to look at the statistics on this have doing a work test has the greatest.  Predictive validity of whether somebody can do the job. It stands to reason  

way better. So why? Why do it more often? Why don't we do it more often? 

Ooh, why don't we do it more often? I think it's.

a bit more challenging to set up. You know, it's not an HR. HR probably can, you know, collect some candidates together, but they're going to struggle to write a test for marketing and also a test for technical and also a test for, you know, the IT department. So I think, you know, it requires more input, more energy to set up.

I think there is this thing about this. It's expected.  Interviews are so expected.  You know, the, the, we we're, we're kind of, we're  conditioned, I guess to, to go down this route. 

I, I mean, just to be contentious, I might say also, if I'm the manager, I want to hire who I wanna hire.  

So why 

do I want a work test that's going to, that's gonna decide for me who I get as opposed to I meet the five candidates and I pick the one I want. 

Or, you know, we do a work test and we, we pull one out of the hat. I don't like that very much because I like to gym and I want Jim to be on the team. 

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.  And I think that's, that's probably true. You know, there's element to which that's the case. 

Yeah. 

Other alternatives and the kind of low bar to entry alternative here is the structured interview, it strikes me, the interview which says here are the seven questions we're going to ask every candidate, they are exactly the same, 

yep, 

and I will write down your answer or we'll record your answer, we'll compare it to somebody else's and which is the best answer.

And no 

off piste, no off piste. 

Right, I'm not going to ask you about your holiday or how you know,  You know, because we're connected on LinkedIn. It's, it's, it's not that it's much more about, you know, are you able to do the job based on your interview responses?  

Seems a bit cold.  

Yeah, and I think, I think it is quite cold.

I've been on the receiving end of those structured interviews and yeah, I think you don't get that opportunity to build rapport. 

And you 

don't get the opportunity to just share your you know, your kind of random stories or whatever else  and, and that's both an advantage for some and a disadvantage for others.

It depends, you know, do we want, a system that is fair and that allows for equal you know, equal opportunity to, to show your skills off. All  

right, we've reached the point. Yeah. 

Dead X are 

no dead eggs.  What is the question?  

Yeah, is, is, are structured interviews a dead X, an idea worth binning, or are they something with redeeming features that we want to keep?

Behavioural interviews, you meant to say. 

What did I say? Structural? Apologies, I'm getting, I'm getting in the muddle. 

Something that we want to keep or something we want to dead X. That's the question.  

Correct. I got a view  Ah, have I got I mean I have got a view I think we probably do need to to dead X them and replace them with structured interviews  And yet,  there's a really, really kind of moth to the flame part about, you know, that personality bit being,  being important and,  you know, likeability.

So, yeah, I'm saying let's definitely bin them,  but I don't find that easy to do necessarily.  

Okay.  So bend I'm going to bend them too, because I think they are, they're silly, but maybe my add ons would be personality is important. And if you, if you know what you're looking for in a, in a certain role where personality is going to be important,  maybe you don't need a behavioral interview.

Maybe you just need a personality test.  and hire and just, you know,  hire against the person, you know, just use that as information that you can then, you know, put into the system. I know a lot of people don't like that. That's just one idea. I'm much more in favor of the audition, the trial,  the,  the demonstrate that you can do this work, show us, show us what it looks like. 

Right. It takes more time, as you pointed out, it's harder to set up.  But  when I've certainly my experience when, when we have taken the time to do that,  the gap between the candidates capabilities.  Becomes very, very obvious whereas that was not obvious through behavioral interview. So that's, that's where I am on behavioral interview, dead X, and we need a new sound effect for dead X, don't we? 

When we, you 

know, a bin, yeah, then 

when we need to work on that, I'll work on that. Yeah, so that's where I am.  

Okay. Sounds good. John, thank you for your time today. It's been an interesting discussion. 

All right, Anna. Thanks a lot. We will see you soon on the next episode. 

Super. 

Ciao.