Your Interviews Are an Assessment—So Why Aren’t You Treating Them Like One?
Interviews are the gateway to finding the right talent—assessing fit, qualifications, and potential contributions, but unlike other parts of the hiring process, they often lack the same rigor for consistency, accuracy, and fairness. It is time that changed.
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Building a Better Team Starts with Better Interviews
Within an effective talent acquisition strategy, interviewing can sit in a silo, with little investment in training, tools and measures. Partly as they’re seen as a human interaction that is hard to measure (less than half of organizations measure the ROI of interviews), and partly as most people see themselves as good ‘judges of character,’ so rarely consider how to make interviews a transparent, data-driven, scientific assessment technique.
The U.S. Department of Labor estimates that a bad hire can cost your business 30 percent of the employee’s first-year earnings so getting hiring right first time is critical, and interviews remain a cornerstone of the selection process for several reasons:
- Candidate Fit: interviews provide an opportunity to assess a candidate’s qualifications, cultural alignment, and communication skills.
- Decision-Making Tool: interviews enable hiring managers to gather qualitative insights that complement quantitative assessments such as cognitive or technical tests.
- Candidate Engagement: interviews allow candidates to learn about the organization and role, influencing their decision to join if offered the position.
Are Your Interviews Helping or Hurting Hiring Decisions?
Most organizations think of interviews and assessments as separate things. But here’s the truth: interviews are an assessment. And if they’re not structured like one, you’re introducing unnecessary risk into your hiring process.
If you think your interviews are working just fine, consider this:
- Subjectivity leads to hiring mistakes. Different interviewers focus on different things, often relying on personal bias instead of clear evaluation criteria.
- Gut feel is not data. Without a structured, scientific approach, hiring teams can’t consistently track or measure what’s actually working in their interviews.
- Candidates lose trust. Candidates often feel they are just making small talk with little clarity of how the interview contributes to decision-making, damaging reputation.
“Interviews are a complete black box. We have no idea what’s being asked. We have no idea what’s being said. There’s no real documentation.”
Head of Talent Acquisition at a Large US Bank
What Happens When You Treat Interviews Like an Assessment?
Interviews can be just as structured and predictive as any other hiring assessment. When companies apply assessment science to interviewing, they see:
- More accurate hiring decisions—interviewers assess the same skills consistently, leading to better talent selection.
- Less bias—structured interviews reduce subjectivity and help hiring managers focus on job-relevant skills.
- Better candidate experience—candidates get the transparency they expect in decision-making, knowing they have been fairly and thoroughly evaluated, regardless of outcome.
The Bottom Line
If interviews are a core part of your hiring process, they should be as rigorous and predictive as any other assessment. Structured, science-backed interviews don’t just improve hiring accuracy—they make the entire process more fair, efficient, and candidate-friendly.
So, are you treating your interviews like the assessment they truly are? If not, it’s time to start.
Learn more about how you can apply structure and science to your interview process and get consistent, measurable and transparent data-driven decisions.
