It is a performance, on both sides, by two people who both want it to go well. That is a reasonable way to check whether you can have a conversation with someone. It is a poor way to predict two years of work.
Think back to the last hire that did not work. Almost nobody says the person turned out to lack the skills on their CV. What they say is that the person could not take a decision without checking, or would not raise a problem until it was too late, or needed managing far more closely than anyone expected.
None of that shows up in an interview, because none of it is the kind of thing an interview can see. It is behaviour under conditions, and the interview has no conditions in it.
Twenty minutes each, before you meet them. It costs the candidate almost nothing and it costs you a fraction of one wrong hire.
Instead of the same questions everyone asks and everyone has rehearsed, you go and check the two or three things the profile raised about this specific person and this specific seat.
Including what this person will need from their manager. Most hires that fail were not the wrong person — they were the right person put under a manager who ran them the wrong way.
It sounds like a screening device that makes hiring colder. In practice it does the opposite, because it removes the part of hiring that is pure impression — who was confident in the room, who was similar to the interviewer, who happened to interview on a good day.
The quiet candidate who is excellent at the job stops being filtered out by the loud one who is excellent at interviews. That is the single most common thing our clients notice in their first year of hiring this way.
We will show you what the profile would tell you about the shortlist, and what you would otherwise find out in month four.
