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A job interview should help you understand whether a person is truly a good fit for your organization. Yet it doesn't always let you tell apart someone who can become a good team member from someone who only seems to be one during the interview.
\nThe risk cuts both ways: you can miss a person with real potential because they don't match your initial expectations, or you can choose a candidate who comes across as convincing but, once on board, turns out to be a poor fit for the way work is done.
\nSo how can you tell, during an interview, who really has what it takes to become a productive team member?
\nWhat is actually useful to do during an interview and, above all, which traits should you observe to improve your chances of making a good hire?
\nSeen this way, the interview is not just a moment when candidates tell you who they are and what they can do. It becomes a tool for gathering concrete evidence on how they deal with what they don't know yet, how they respond to requests, and how willing they are to adapt and learn.
\nSo before asking which questions to ask, you need to understand what makes an interview ineffective and what consequences a selection based on the wrong elements can have.
\nIn everyday life, everyone ends up conducting interviews of some kind. Not only when hiring a team member: choosing a babysitter, a house cleaner, a plumber, or a travel agency also involves a conversation to figure out whether that person or service fits your needs.
\nIn all these cases there is a need to meet and, before choosing, you try to gather some information about the person or service you're evaluating.
\nThat is exactly what an interview is for: comparing what you need with what is being offered, so you can make a choice.
\nThe problem arises when this comparison fails to capture what really matters for the decision.
\nThe interview is one of the moments when you gather the information you need to make a selection: if it doesn't capture what really counts, the hiring decision itself can end up being ineffective.
\nIn employee selection, the interview should make it possible to evaluate a candidate against the needs of the organization. If the method used can't effectively surface the person's characteristics, the evaluation may rest on elements that don't adequately predict how they will settle into the job.
\nAt this point you need to understand how relevant this issue is in today's hiring landscape, and what research says about how effective current selection methods are.
\nTo understand how widespread the problem of ineffective job interviews is today, you need to consider several factors: the availability of candidates, the match between the skills available on the market and those companies need, and also the effectiveness of the methods used to select people.
\nThis field is rich in studies that set out to answer the following questions:
\nThe first interesting figure concerns how hard it is to find the people companies are looking for. In Italy, hard-to-fill profiles accounted for 21.5% in 2017; by 2025 they had reached 47%[1]. In eight years, the percentage more than doubled.
\nYet, over those same years, education levels in Italy rose: among people aged 25 to 64, the share holding at least an upper secondary qualification went from 60.9% in 2017[2] to 66.7% in 2024, while the share with a tertiary degree went from 18.7% to 22.3%[8]. It's a paradox: there are more people with higher levels of education, yet companies are finding it harder and harder to get the skills they need.
\nThe problem also affects people already working inside companies. In Italy, 37% of businesses report a gap between the skills they need and those their workers have[3]. The shortfalls mainly concern technical skills, but also problem solving and teamwork.
\nOn top of this comes a particularly interesting finding about selection. For years, certain tools were thought to be very effective at predicting who the best candidate would be. More recent research, however, shows lower values than the 1998 estimates[4]. The meta-analytic review by Sackett, Zhang, Berry, and Lievens (2022) recalculates those validities by fixing a systematic overcorrection for range restriction[5]: the ability of the structured interview to predict future job performance drops from 0.51 to 0.42; that of the work sample from 0.54 to 0.33. In the revised ranking, the structured interview still remains the strongest predictor among those examined[5]: the review lowers the absolute level of validity, not the relative usefulness of the tools. Research on employee selection therefore shows that the ability of these methods to identify in advance who will truly fit the job is more limited than once thought.
\nThis doesn't mean selection tools don't work, but that simply talking to a candidate is not necessarily enough to understand whether they're the right person. Research shows that evaluation becomes more reliable when the process is structured, with criteria set in advance, shared standards, and independent ratings[6]. So, as it becomes harder to find the skills you need, the way people are evaluated and chosen becomes even more important.
\nThe data therefore show that employee selection today takes place in a context where finding and choosing the right people is anything but simple. This makes it even more important to understand what happens when the selection process doesn't work the way it should.
\nAn ineffective job interview can produce consequences that become visible well after the meeting with the candidate is over, when it becomes clear that the selection did not identify the person best suited to the organization's needs. It's when the person gets into the thick of the work and starts dealing with the organization's system that the effects of an ineffective selection can emerge.
\nThese effects can be recognized through a few concrete signals that tell you when the selection process has not produced the expected result:
\nOn top of these effects come the costs of hiring, training, and shadowing, plus the time during which a role stays unfilled. A new hire initially requires closer oversight and also brings all the administrative costs tied to the employment contract.
\nIn short, a new person is a significant cost for the company. That's why it matters to understand how you arrive at selecting them and, above all, by what logic the choice is made.
\nWhen the choice is made without sufficiently solid criteria, decision-making mechanisms can also come into play that shift attention away from whether the solution really fits.
\nEmployee selection works in a way similar to buying a house. Houses can be bought in three ways:
\nIn employee selection, too, you can reach a choice through similar mechanisms. That's why the risk of not hiring the right candidate is high.
\nThe effects of an ineffective selection, then, are not only about choosing the wrong person or losing a valuable candidate: they have concrete consequences for the entire system, in terms of time, costs, and results. The problem is therefore significant, and its impact can be quantified.
\nIf a wrong hire can create costs and difficulties that drag on over time, you need to understand what result you should be aiming for instead, and how the right method can get you there.
\nWhat is the ideal condition to aim for?
\nWhen looking for a definitive solution to any problem, the starting point is to pay attention to what you want to achieve, because if the target condition is defined incorrectly, the solution won't necessarily solve the problem in a stable, lasting way.
\nIt often happens that you set a goal that seems logical and intuitive but isn't the right one to work toward to fix the situation.
\nThe ideal condition that appears most logical, intuitive, and popular actually carries some hidden risks.
\nWith the problem of ineffective job interviews, a common idea is that the ideal condition is: \"finding team members who know how to do the job (who are already autonomous and independent)\"
\nIn this case, hiring starts from a job description and you look for someone who can already do what's needed: a competent, autonomous, independent person who matches the company's expectations right from the start.
\nThe problem is that the more the search is based on precise, rigid expectations, the less likely you are to find the right person.
\nThe more narrowly you define what the candidate must have, and the more those traits turn into a rigid expectation, the harder it becomes to find a person who matches that model exactly.
\nParadoxically, the very traits that make a candidate look particularly suitable could be what makes you lose sight of the people who are actually right.
\nThere's another problem as well. In an interview, it's relatively easy for candidates to present themselves in a way that matches what the interviewer is looking for, even by inventing or overstating traits that are hard to verify.
\nSo the much sought-after trait of competence and autonomy becomes the wrong goal to set when hiring.
\nWhat you should look for instead, the ideal condition, becomes: \"finding team members who know how to learn (who want to become autonomous and independent)\"
\nThe right condition, then, is to look for people who know how to learn and genuinely want to become autonomous and independent.
\nThese are people who, by their nature, want to act in ways that bring value to the system and aim to reach autonomy through learning.
\nAt the beginning, in fact, a person can't fully know the company they're joining. They need time to understand the system and adapt to it, and this adaptation happens through learning.
\nThat's why it becomes more effective to shorten the selection phase and intensify the onboarding and monitoring phase.
\nIf you can't fully know a person before they join the system, it's more effective to reduce the time spent trying to predict through the interview and increase the time spent observing how the person learns and adapts during onboarding.
\nUnderstanding and adaptability take priority over specific skills. Openness to change, in this sense, is about how a person deals with what they don't know, looks for the information they need, and changes the way they act to adapt to a new situation. A propensity for change and learning can therefore lead a person to become an excellent team member.
\nThe problem is that selection tends to look for the what, meaning the skills someone already has, when you should be observing the how, meaning the general method a person uses to approach things and learn to do them.
\nThe more a person believes they already have all the skills they need, the less malleable they may be with respect to the system they're joining. They may think: \"I have my own way, I already know how it's done, I'll come in and apply what I know.\" But that very attitude can make them rigid and reluctant to adapt.
\n
Knowledge and skills still matter, but being open to change matters just as much.
\nThe search should therefore focus on people who can do well what the company is missing, but who are at the same time flexible, willing to adapt to the system, open to change, able to respond to requests and to look for the information they need.
\nThe goal is to find a person who can adapt to the system they're joining.
\nThis is why you need to work on the company's current selection process and look for new requirements that, beyond specific skills, concern how the person makes themselves available to the company and approaches their own learning path.
\nTo improve the effectiveness of a job interview, it's not enough to correct the mistakes that surface during the meeting with the candidate. To get a truly lasting result, you need to understand the process that leads the interview to produce an ineffective evaluation.
\nThis means first examining how the problem is interpreted: which beliefs guide the evaluation of the candidate, and which causes are considered to be at the root of a poor selection decision.
\nBehind every evaluation, in fact, there's a specific way of reading what happens. In an interview, too, the information gathered is interpreted on the basis of certain ideas about what makes a person suitable or unsuitable for a role.
\nThese beliefs therefore shape both what gets observed during the interview and the meaning attributed to the candidate's answers and behavior. If the starting criterion is wrong, you risk focusing on the wrong elements and making decisions that don't truly identify the most suitable person. In this case, even fixing individual aspects of the interview may not be enough, because the problem lies upstream of the moment the decision is made.
\nAt the root of the problem, then, there's a wrong idea that feeds it and creates it. It's a widespread idea, and precisely because the problem is widespread, it seems easily acceptable, almost normal.
\nThe wrong idea in question, on which the selection of unsuitable candidates rests, concerns the most common tool used during an interview and the belief attached to it: questions are the cornerstone tool of an interview.
\nBelieving that questions are the cornerstone tool of an interview is the starting point to work on: you need to challenge this idea to solve the problem of ineffective employee selection once and for all.
\nQuestions are, in fact, a weak tool for selection, for several reasons:
\nThe answers given during an interview are therefore caught in a conflict of interest between what actually happened and what the interviewer wants to hear.
\nSeveral studies have examined intentional response distortion during job interviews, meaning the behaviors through which candidates try to present themselves more favorably than reality. This phenomenon is known as faking and includes several forms, among them tailoring, which means adapting answers to what you think the interviewer wants to hear, and borrowing, which means presenting other people's experiences or achievements as your own[7].
\nThese behaviors are not necessarily fraud and can be displayed even by the most honest person. They are dynamics that can emerge naturally in a situation where the candidate has an interest in presenting themselves in the best possible way.
\nThat's why questions are not the right tool to base a selection on.
\nThe right idea on which to base the solution to the problem of ineffective job interviews is, instead: tests are the cornerstone tool of an interview.
\nUnlike a question, which asks candidates to describe how they would behave, a test creates a concrete, observable situation in which the trait you're looking for can show itself. Tests provide realistic, verifiable data: demonstrating an attitude, a mindset, or a habit carries far more weight than the words someone uses to describe themselves.
\nA skilled interviewer knows how to set up the right tests in the interview and observe the responses in terms of behavior.
\nFor example, you can give a precise delegated task and observe whether it's carried out as asked, whether the person responds precisely, and how they react if they fail to complete the task correctly.
\nThis also makes it possible to evaluate awareness of not being perfect and openness to change.
\nYou need to create situations in which the interviewer can observe not what the person says they can do, but what they actually do.
\nAttention should therefore go not only to competence but also to openness to change. And this trait must be detected through practical tests, not through questions.
\nWith this point clarified, you can take a further step: if the selection process keeps producing ineffective evaluations, you need to understand what prevents the interview from working properly.
\nYou need to trace back the causes that lead to ineffective interviews. Here too, though, you need to be careful: what is perceived as the cause of the problem doesn't always coincide with its real origin. Acting on an apparent cause can change the way the interview is conducted without eliminating what keeps undermining the quality of the evaluation.
\nThat's why it's important to distinguish false causes from real causes, identifying the elements you actually need to act on to make the interview an effective selection tool.
\nWhat is usually considered to be at the root of ineffective job interviews can be traced back to two main causes, which are also two very popular beliefs in companies:
\nIn both cases, the cause of the problem has not been identified, yet attention shifts to interventions that require an investment of resources (time, money, energy) in the wrong direction, one that doesn't lead to a definitive solution.
\nIn the first case, we've already seen why questions shouldn't be treated as the cornerstone tool of an interview, given the dynamics they trigger (the possibility of manipulating information, the difficulty of verifying whether an answer is true).
\nIn the second case, keep in mind that handing hiring over to an external provider often amounts to abdicating, that is, shifting your own task onto someone else: this is what happens when selection is fully outsourced.
\nEmployee selection is, instead, an inherently managerial task: no one else can do it in the manager's place. Only the first screening can possibly be left to agencies, which can reduce the number of candidates (even though this is still a potentially risky filter).
\nThe manager is the one who will then work directly with the person being evaluated, which is why it's essential for selection to be carried out within the company.
\nDoes a great chef let someone else choose the ingredients they'll cook with? Does a carpenter let someone else choose the piece of wood they'll work on? Most likely, the answer to both questions is no.
\nTo select a person, you need to know the company and the characteristics of the system that person will join. The agency doesn't have access to all this information and, as a result, can't fully know what is really needed inside that system.
\nSo, although these are the most common causes blamed for ineffective job interviews, they aren't the place to start if you actually want to solve the problem and, on the contrary, start recruiting suitable, valuable candidates.
\nIt's essential to recognize the real causes of the problem and act on them with practical steps to reach a stable result.
\nTo understand why a job interview can lead to an ineffective evaluation, it's not enough to observe what happens during the meeting with the candidate. You need to trace back the process by which the requirements to look for are first defined and then verified.
\nTwo main causes emerge at the root of the problem: you look for requirements that aren't useful enough to predict how the person will fit into the work system and, even when the requirements are right, you use tools that don't let you actually observe them.
\nYou look for the wrong requirements
\nThe first problem concerns what is considered important in selection.
\nIn many cases, attention focuses mainly on the knowledge and skills a person already has, or on their ability to work autonomously and independently. These elements can be relevant, but they don't necessarily describe the person's ability to become autonomous within a specific work system.
\nThe question, then, is not only to understand what the candidate can already do, but to observe what they would do to learn how to do what they can't do yet.
\nTo become progressively autonomous, you need to be able to understand what you need to know, identify the missing information, look for answers, and build your own learning. Autonomy, in this sense, doesn't mean already having all the necessary knowledge at the start, but being able to develop whatever is needed to function within the system.
\nThe requirement to observe therefore also becomes openness to change, meaning the way a person deals with what they don't know, reacts to a new situation, and creates the conditions to learn.
\nThat's why, in selection, mindset and behavioral habits carry significant weight: it's not just about checking the skills someone already has, but about understanding how the person could evolve in relation to the needs of the role.
You use an ineffective method to detect the requirements
\nIdentifying the right requirements, however, isn't enough. The second problem concerns how these requirements are detected during the interview.
\nIf what you want to know is how a person reacts to a new situation, learns, listens, gathers information, or deals with what they don't know yet, you need to be able to observe these behaviors.
\nA question, on the other hand, mainly captures what candidates say about themselves. The answer may describe a behavior, an intention, or an ability the person believes they have, but it doesn't necessarily let you verify how they would act when actually facing that situation.
\nThe limitation, then, isn't just the question itself, but the gap between what a person says they can do and what they show they can do when they have to deal with a situation in practice.
\nTo detect certain requirements, it therefore becomes necessary to introduce practical tests and concrete situations into the selection process, in which you can observe the person's behavior as they tackle a task, look for a solution, or deal with something they don't know.
To make the interview truly effective, then, you need to act on both levels: first understand what needs to be detected, then choose a method that lets you actually observe it. From here you can move on to the practical phase: which adjustments turn these principles into a concrete way of conducting an interview?
\nSolutions must act directly on the causes identified, because these are gaps to fill, shortcomings that show what you need to put in place to solve the problem.
\nIn the case of ineffective job interviews, the practical actions to apply involve two corrections to the way employee selection is carried out, specifically:
\nmake a list of requirements about the general method (habits and mindset)
\nYou need to identify the fundamental requirements for the person who will join the system.
\nThese may include openness to change, the ability to listen before acting, punctuality, and other elements that aren't a specific skill but a habit or mindset that guides how the person behaves, and that they must show they have in the way they act.
make a list of tests that make these requirements visible
\nOnce the requirements are identified, you need to build tests that make them observable.
\nThink of small situations that clearly exemplify the requirements the candidate must have.
\nTests could include, for example:
The principle is therefore simple: more tests, fewer questions.
\nThis gives selection a different substance, because it doesn't rely only on what a person says about themselves, but on what you can observe directly in their behavior.
\nA test is an accelerator.
\nIn conclusion, to improve selection you first need to establish which requirements really matter for the role and then choose a method that lets you detect them reliably. This is where tests prove their value: candidates are evaluated not only on what they claim they can do, but on how they behave in situations that let you concretely observe the traits you're looking for.
\nFrom this perspective, the interview is no longer just a moment when candidates talk about their experience and skills, but becomes an evaluation tool embedded in a broader process, in which what you're looking for must be something you can actually observe and verify.
\n[1] Unioncamere – Ministero del Lavoro e delle Politiche Sociali (2025). La domanda di professioni e di formazione delle imprese italiane nel 2025, Sistema Informativo Excelsior — https://excelsior.unioncamere.net/sites/default/files/pubblicazioni/2025/Domanda_professioni_formazione_imprese.pdf
\n[2] ISTAT (2018). Livelli di istruzione della popolazione e ritorni occupazionali dell'istruzione: i principali indicatori – Anno 2017. July 13, 2018 — https://www.istat.it/it/files/2018/07/Indicatori-dellistruzione.pdf (starting values: 60.9% and 18.7% in 2017)
\n[3] OECD (2024). Understanding Skill Gaps in Firms: Results of the PIAAC Employer Module. OECD Skills Studies. OECD Publishing, Paris.
\n[4] Schmidt, F. L., & Hunter, J. E. (1998). The Validity and Utility of Selection Methods in Personnel Psychology: Practical and Theoretical Implications of 85 Years of Research Findings. Psychological Bulletin, 124(2), 262–274.
\n[5] Sackett, P. R., Zhang, C., Berry, C. M., & Lievens, F. (2022). Revisiting Meta-Analytic Estimates of Validity in Personnel Selection: Addressing Systematic Overcorrection for Restriction of Range. Journal of Applied Psychology, 107(11), 2040–2068 — https://doi.org/10.1037/apl0000994
\n[6] Highhouse, S., & Brooks, M. E. (2023). Improving Workplace Judgments by Reducing Noise: Lessons Learned from a Century of Selection Research. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 10, 519–533.
\n[7] Levashina, J., & Campion, M. A. (2007). Measuring Faking in the Employment Interview: Development and Validation of an Interview Faking Behavior Scale. Journal of Applied Psychology, 92(6), 1638–1656.
\n[8] ISTAT (2025). Livelli di istruzione e ritorni occupazionali – Anno 2024, December 3, 2025 — https://www.istat.it/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/Report-Livelli-di-istruzione-e-ritorni-occupazionali-Anno-2024.pdf (\"I numeri chiave\" table, end values: 66.7% and 22.3% in 2024)
","headings":[{"level":2,"text":"The problem: ineffective job interviews","id":"the-problem-ineffective-job-interviews"},{"level":3,"text":"What science says about the effectiveness of employee selection today","id":"what-science-says-about-the-effectiveness-of-employee-selection-today"},{"level":2,"text":"The effects of an ineffective interview","id":"the-effects-of-an-ineffective-interview"},{"level":2,"text":"What effective selection should produce","id":"what-effective-selection-should-produce"},{"level":2,"text":"The mechanism that produces ineffective evaluations in the employee selection process","id":"the-mechanism-that-produces-ineffective-evaluations-in-the-employee-selection-process"},{"level":3,"text":"The most common false causes of ineffective job interviews","id":"the-most-common-false-causes-of-ineffective-job-interviews"},{"level":3,"text":"The real causes that make job interviews ineffective","id":"the-real-causes-that-make-job-interviews-ineffective"},{"level":2,"text":"Practical tips for conducting effective job interviews","id":"practical-tips-for-conducting-effective-job-interviews"},{"level":2,"text":"Sources and references","id":"sources-and-references"}],"tldr":"","tldrItems":null}