I genuinely believe that credibility of recruiting interviews is overblown. To put it more starkly, as explained by the authors of Noise, they are often useless.
Job interveiw sounds robust and effective, but turns out to be as predictive - or unpredictive, for that matter - as any information source from marketing.
What's missing is the awareness of cognitive bias: an illusion of interviewers who think they can make sense of information collected from an interview. The same is true in our imaging a shape in the contours of a cloud. That's literally having our heads in the clouds: spend enough time looking at the sky and we will start seeing pattern out of the clouds. We use the term pareidolia to describe our natural tendency to perceive a specific image in a random or ambiguous visual pattern. You read that right: the interviewers are often imagining a pattern out of answers given by the candidates.
To figure out how likely interviewer is to have excessive tendency to seek and find coherence, researchers had designed experiments by asking some of the interviewees to answer questions randomly. Can you imagine giving a random answer "yes" or taking the "this" option as determined by the first letter of the questions? But you know what? Not a single interviewer realised that the candidates were giving random answers. This might sound counterintuitive, but the interviewers in this "random" condition were as likely as those who had met truthful candidates to agree that they were "able to infer a lot about this person given the amount of time we spent together."
Such is our accuracy of recruiting interview. As good as throwing a dice.
