What Makes an Interview Effective (or Not)

The worst job interview I ever had was when I was fresh out of high school, looking for a summer/college job and applied to work at my local Apple Store. While I am sure they’ve changed their processes in time, it was not a good experience then. They did not inform me that it was going to be a group interview, so I arrived expecting a one-on-one conversation and found myself in a room with over twenty other candidates. We were divided into small groups and had to solve logic puzzles together, essentially SAT style questions. At the end, only one person from each group was invited to continue interviewing, and the rest of us were sent home with a “no thank you”, and zero feedback. It felt less like a job interview and more like an audition for a play. 

Using this week’s learning materials, that interview lacked reliability and validity. Reliability means a process produces consistent results across candidates, and validity means the method measures what it is supposed to measure (Swift, 2025). Apple’s process may have been designed to test teamwork, but it instead measured stress tolerance and performance under pressure, which are not really related to what the day to day duties of an in store sales associate are. The process also had low utility, meaning it probably cost them more time and effort than predictive value for hiring success. 

On the other hand, my most effective interview was with my most recent role in sales at a packaging company. That process was structured, multi-staged, and thoughtful: a phone screen, an office interview, and finally a lunch with my future manager and a successful coworker. The format allowed them to assess both my interpersonal skills and person-organization fit. It demonstrated high reliability, validity, and utility because it was job-relevant, consistent, and cost-effective (Knight, 2017).

If I could advise Apple now, I’d suggest adding structured behavioral questions and removing unnecessary group puzzles. As the HBR article “How to Take the Bias Out of Interviews” reminds us, standardized questions and scoring guides help minimize bias and increase fairness, something that would have made that experience far more effective and equitable.

References

Bohnet, I. (2016, April 18). How to take the bias out of interviews. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2016/04/how-to-take-the-bias-out-of-interviews

Knight, R. (2017, June 12). 7 practical ways to reduce bias in your hiring process. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2017/06/7-practical-ways-to-reduce-bias-in-your-hiring-process

Swift, M. (2025). Introduction to Selection. Lecture.