Insights for Interviews From Kahneman's Noise

Old style "chat" interviews where you talk to a candidate and have a conversion feel the most effective. People love them because they get a strong gut feel for the candidate and think that's good.

Those interviews have a 50% correlation with on-the-job performance. Useless. The decision has more to do with the interviewer than the interviewee.

Structured interviews work better. Prepare questions in advance, define an evaluation rubric, and ask everyone the same questions in the same order. Then evaluate their answers against the rubric, not against how you feel. This reduces situation noise.

Kahneman et al identify 3 types of noise.

1. Systematic noise caused by consistent biases in judgement. Like an engineer who always under-estimates Jira stories.
2. Interpersonal noise happens when different experts review the same data and come to different conclusions. Like when engineers disagree on a story estimate.
3. Situation noise describes how the same expert changes their judgement based on random situational factors. Like an engineer who under-estimates when they're excited and over-estimates when tired.