What If We Killed Unstructured Interviews

What if we got rid of unstructured job interviews?

Reasons to get rid of the malignantly useless unstructured job interviews:

1. Employers aren't as good at evaluating talent as they think they are. Unstructured inverviews that test cultural fit have little validity. Structured interviews have proven to be more useful.

2. Candidates who are good at unstructured interviews aren't good at their job in many cases. Individuals possessing the dark triad personality traits (narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy) are likely to fare much better in job interviews than normal people. An unstructured interview is a test to see if a candidate is a charmer. It does not test capability.

3. Employers look for candidates who replicate themselves. What this means is that diverse candidates will be hired at lower rates.

The solution:

Unstructured interviews should be replaced by either technical interviews or multiple choice tests. Another possibility is computer-driven evaluations extracted from digital interviews. Robotic assessments would entirely eliminate biases that are impossible for humans to ignore like gender, age, race, or appearance.

A case study is the way that the University of Texas Medical School at Houston chose to expand their admissions from 150 to 200 students after they already admitted 150 preferred students (75% of the variability in difference ratings between the 150 preferred and 50 later accepted could be accounted for by the interviewers' perceptions of the candidates rather than objective measures like test scores). When they studied the results, it was found that the 50 students later admitted did just as well in and after medical school as their peers who were preferred as a result of unstructured interviews.