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Stop Guessing in Interviews: Structured Hiring That Works · The Science of Leading

• 0:00
  Welcome to The Science of Leading.
• 0:01
  I'm Claire Monroe with Edwin Carrington.
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  Let me start with something painfully familiar.
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  Candidate walks in, great handshake,
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  smooth story, confident eye contact,
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  says everything you want to hear... and six months later,
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  you're quietly wondering how you got it so wrong.
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  And the uncomfortable
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  truth is, most people in that room thought they were being careful.
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  They weren't.
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  They were being impressed.
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  And those are two very different mental processes."Impressed" is doing
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  a lot of work there.
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  Because interviews do seem to reward polish.
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  Fluency.
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  Likeability.
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  Sometimes just... being similar to the interviewer.
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  Not necessarily whether this person can actually deliver results when
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  things get messy.
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  Exactly.
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  Most hiring still operates on a kind of quiet assumption that you can
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  infer future behavior from a short conversation.
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  Thirty, maybe forty-five minutes,
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  and suddenly we believe we've assessed judgment,
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  resilience, integrity.
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  In reality, we've mostly observed how someone performs in an interview
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  setting.
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  That's such a subtle shift.
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  So the candidate might be excellent at the very specific job of interviewing...
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  not the actual job they're being hired to do.
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  Yes.
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  Interviews often turn into auditions for confidence.
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  And confidence is persuasive to the point of being misleading.
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  Without evidence, it's just presentation.
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  The deeper issue is that organizations still rely on intuition as if
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  human behavior reveals itself quickly and cleanly.
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  It doesn't.
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  And once you believe you can "read people," you stop demanding
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  proof.
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  You just... trust your impression.
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  Which, to be fair, a lot of leaders say with absolute certainty.
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  They
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  do.
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  I've said it myself in the past.
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  And I was wrong often enough to stop trusting that instinct.
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  Strong hiring systems don't ask,
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  "Did I like them?" They ask, "What did they actually demonstrate,
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  and did we evaluate that consistently?"So this is where structure comes
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  in.
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  Because without it, interviews are basically... improvisation.
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  Sometimes insightful, sometimes all over the place,
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  and almost impossible to compare.
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  That's a good way to frame it.
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  In an unstructured interview, one candidate gets deep questions about
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  conflict, another talks about career goals,
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  and a third ends up telling a story about a marathon.
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  Then we line them up and pretend the comparison is fair.
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  It isn't.
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  And when people talk about "FBI-style" interviewing,
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  what they really mean is discipline.
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  Same questions, clear signals,
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  observable behavior... not just gut feeling.
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  Exactly.
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  Strip away the branding and it's very straightforward.
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  Ask comparable questions.
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  Look for concrete examples.
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  Understand what happened, what the person did,
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  and what changed as a result.
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  Then evaluate that against defined criteria.
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  That's closer to investigation than impression.
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  That structure matters.
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  Because if someone says, "I'm a strong leader," that's... nice,
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  but meaningless.
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  If they say, "I took over a team of 12,
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  turnover was high, I changed how we ran one-on-ones,
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  clarified roles, and retention improved," now you actually have something
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  to work with.
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  Exactly.
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  Past behavior isn't perfect, but it's far more reliable than charisma.
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  And it improves fairness.
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  Because when decisions are driven by instinct,
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  instinct tends to favor what feels familiar.
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  That's where bias quietly enters the system.
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  And then we layer technology
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  on top of that and call it progress.
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  That's where "algorithmically mediated inequality" comes in,
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  right?
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  Bias, but now it's automated and harder to see.
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  Yes.
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  If you digitize a flawed process,
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  you don't remove bias, you scale it.
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  And if the system is opaque, managers don't even understand why decisions
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  are being made.
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  That's not rigor.
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  That's outsourcing responsibility.
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  So let's make this practical.
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  If someone actually wants to improve hiring,
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  what do strong systems do differently?
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  They define success before the
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  interview begins.
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  They standardize questions.
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  They focus on job-relevant behaviors.
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  And they score answers based on evidence,
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  not delivery style.
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  The research on this is consistent.
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  Structured interviews outperform intuition.
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  And when we say structured,
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  we're not just talking about rigid scripts.
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  There are specific types of questions that work better,
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  right?
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  Yes.
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  Three categories tend to be effective.
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  Past behavioral questions, where candidates describe what they've actually
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  done.
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  Situational questions, where they explain how they would handle a realistic
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  scenario.
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  And background questions, which explore relevant experience in a disciplined
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  way.
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  Across multiple studies, these approaches predict performance more reliably
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  than informal conversations.
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  So asking someone to explain a concept perfectly...
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  isn't necessarily the best signal?
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  Correct.
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  Knowledge and performance are related,
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  but they're not the same.
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  Someone can sound highly competent and still struggle with execution,
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  prioritization, or decision-making under pressure.
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  Evidence of behavior tends to be more predictive than polished explanations.
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  That
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  explains why some interviews feel like trivia contests.
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  You're testing recall, not real-world capability.
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  Exactly.
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  And those formats can be appealing because they make the interviewer
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  feel sharp.
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  But hiring isn't about validating the interviewer.
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  It's about making a better prediction.
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  Which brings us back to AI.
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  Because there's a lot of excitement around speed and scale.
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  But if the underlying criteria are weak,
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  you're just accelerating bad decisions.
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  Precisely.
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  Poor inputs at scale produce poor outcomes at scale.
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  If algorithms are built on vague proxies or biased historical data,
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  you get faster, more consistent mistakes.
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  Efficiency without clarity is not progress.
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  So the real value of AI isn't
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  replacing judgment.
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  It's forcing clarity in how decisions are made.
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  That's the useful application.
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  Define criteria clearly.
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  Standardize evaluation.
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  Make scoring transparent.
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  Keep humans accountable.
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  When tools support that process,
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  they reduce noise instead of hiding it.
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  That's where platforms like OAD.
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  ai can be useful,
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  if they're used to structure evidence and improve comparability.
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  So for
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  anyone hiring next week, the move isn't to "trust your gut more." It's
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  to define what good looks like,
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  ask consistent questions, and evaluate actual evidence.
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  Not delivery, not confidence... evidence.
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  Exactly.
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  And one useful mindset shift is this: you're not trying to feel certain
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  after a short conversation.
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  You're trying to reduce the odds of being wrong.
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  And that's a much higher
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  bar.
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  If you want to put that into practice,
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  you can test tools like OAD's behavioral assessments for free at o-a-d-dot-a-i.
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  It's a straightforward way to bring more structure and clarity into hiring.
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  Thanks
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  for listening.
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  See you next time on The Science of Leading.