Why you may want to hire by audition rather than interview!
This would never have occurred to me, except that one of the last contract jobs I had operated this way.
The recruiter called me and said something like: “they’re ready for you now; you can start Monday at $X per hour” … I stammered … “no interview?” Nope, “if he can do what the resume lists, this should work fine.”
I could and did, and worked there for close to two years, mostly very successfully.
Why would a company do it this way rather than the standard interview? Several reasons:
- All the research done on “standard” interviewing shows that there’s often very low correlation between the interviewer’s opinion and the ability of the candidate to succeed in the job. [a] (This particular study was published in 2000, but I don’t think much has changed since then.)
- It’s much more expensive to conduct; ties up two or three productive people in your company for some hours.
- Prone to false negatives if you do it wrong … I’m a computer programmer, and I don’t know how many interviews I’ve failed on “HackerRank” or “Codility” or one of those that aren’t like a real programmer’s job (in almost any case) … (When do you have only 45 minutes to come up with a solution with all edge cases figured out?)
Risk/reward: what’s the risk if you let somebody start without an interview?
Very low, assuming you do an automated background check on candidates … the only risk then is that you’ve wasted time on a candidate while other better people were possibly being hired by your competition.
I don’t expect very many readers will take me up on this, but if you’ve never considered this before please get into a discussion with your team at work (or even the upper management) and try it! See what happens.
