Job interviews often lead to wrong hiring decisions

If you were to interview a baseball player, you would not ask him how he holds the bat, and how far apart he keeps his feet. Yet, these are the kind of questions people get asked on the interviews – theoretical.

Problems:

• There is almost no correlation between theoretical questions and on the job performance.
• Hiring managers are overly confident that they can determine personality and cultural fit based on a 30-60 mins interview. All they are really able to determine how well one acted on their specific interview.
• In technical professions managers confuse communication skills with technical abilities and knowledge. That is, some of the best developers I knew did not have good communication skills.
• This is the age of an empowerment and collaboration where individual performance becomes less important. Individual performance still matters, but the collaboration does not get enough focus on the interviews.
• Many highly qualified people do not perform well in a setting of an interview.
• Many times I hired people who could not answer any of my questions, and they all did very well. I saw a potential in each one of them.