Across internships and on-campus roles, my best interviews shared three traits: structure, job-relevance, and consistent scoring. Structured formats with the same questions for all candidates and behaviorally anchored rating guides felt fairer and produced clearer feedback. That squares with research showing structured interviews are markedly more reliable (higher inter-rater agreement) and more valid. Question design mattered, too. Behavioral “Tell me about a time…” and situational “What would you do if…?” prompts consistently beat vague rapport questions.
I also noticed utility in practice: the best processes combined interviews with another predictor (e.g., a short work sample or job-knowledge task) to improve the overall signal per hire. Classic syntheses (and updates) show that pairing methods boosts overall validity and the economic payoff of selection decisions
By contrast, my least effective interviews were casual, ad-hoc conversations with no clear structure. They produced inconsistent judgments, invited bias, and created noisy hiring decisions