Interviews measure rehearsal

Tell me about a time you showed leadership. The candidate who answers best is the one who prepared that story, rehearsed its arc, and delivered it with eye contact. The candidate who actually led, quietly, for years, and finds self-promotion faintly embarrassing, stumbles. The interview has measured something real. It is just not the job.

Decades of organisational research have been politely clear that unstructured interviews are poor predictors of performance, and that interviewers are confident about them anyway. Confidence is the product. An interview mostly manufactures a feeling of certainty about a decision that remains a guess.

Evidence moves the interview

We are not against conversation. We are against conversation as the primary evidence. The sequence matters: when a company reaches out because of published work, the eventual conversation starts from something true. Walk me through this project. Why did you build it that way. What broke. Those questions have real answers that rehearsal cannot fake, because the work is sitting there, open in another tab.

An interview that begins from evidence is an interrogation of something real. An interview that begins from a CV is an audition for a play nobody will ever stage. We built for the first kind, and the difference shows up in the first five minutes of every conversation that starts here.