01 Oct 2021 management

A friend recently got a promotion at work. I say "promotion", but really it was just a confirmation that she could continue to do the job she'd already been doing for the past year on an "interim" basis.

What surprised me was that she'd had to go through a formal interview process in order to get this promotion. How insulting! What better indication that she could do the job well than the fact she'd already been doing it well for the past year? The idea that you could get better evidence of her suitability from an interview was absurd.

Interviews are a notoriously bad way of predicting how people will perform in a job. Even if you aspire to run an exemplary, Kahneman-inspired "structured interview" process, time constraints, imperfect interviewers, and the difficulty of designing relevant questions mean that interviews are rarely reliable predictors of success. Nevertheless, when you're assessing candidates that are completely unknown to you, interviews at least provide some information about their suitability for the job.

But when a candidate has been working in your organisation for a while already, there is much more information available to you than could possibly be gained from an interview. Why bother asking them to "describe a time they did X", when you (or others in your organisation) already know what happened the last time they did X? Good managers should have these examples to hand and be able to provide accurate assessments of their reports' strengths and weaknesses. So if you feel that you don't have enough information about a person's suitability for a job despite them having worked in your organisation for some time, that suggests a serious failure of management.

Some people argue that interviews are necessary to ensure that promotions are "fair and transparent". All candidates get asked the same questions and are judged according to the same criteria, so there's no room for favouritism. But interviews are not the only way to run fair and transparent processes. So long as candidates all get judged according to the same criteria - and know what those criteria are - there's no reason to require that the supporting evidence comes from answering interview questions rather than real-life work performance.

But it's not just that interviews are a poorer source of information than real-life work performance. Putting internal candidates through interviews is disrespectful. If someone has already demonstrated their abilities (or lack thereof) through their sustained performance at work, why make them go through a contrived interview process? To do so is essentially to say, "We've not been paying enough attention to your performance at work, so we're going to have to judge you on the basis of what you say in the next 1 hour instead". Surely managers should do better than that?