[kfor]

Do you worry that you risk introducing bias into your interview process with this sort of unstructured questioning? There is quite a bit of research [1] demonstrating that structured and standardized interviews across candidates are one of the most crucial ways of preventing various types of bias, conscious or not.

[1] Here's a useful summary article: https://hbr.org/2016/04/how-to-take-the-bias-out-of-intervie...

[vasco]

Good interviewers have the candidate feel like it's open ended by asking open ended questions that still tick the boxes they need to tick. Meaning the interviewer has a structure and a series of things to make sure to get information about, but to a casual listener of 3 different interviews, they might not even be able to piece out what those questions are, because you can make it fully contextual to the person.

With a bit of luck and skill you can get through a whole interview and take all your notes and the candidate doesn't even feel when you switch from one question to the other. Start open ended, make sure you can tick the boxes you have to tick from your questionnaire and dig in the threads you need to dig. Some people aren't good at doing this and they need to be more led by the interviewer, in those cases you can easily "adjust down" and be more explicit, but this way you get the best of both worlds.

Standardized notes with specific topics as well as the opportunity for people to tell you about what _they_ think was interesting about those situations, which is hard to predict from just a questionnaire.

[michaelt]

You wouldn't want the entire interview to be unstructured, but because every candidate is different, I think it's more than fair to give people an opportunity to highlight their own strongest areas.

I wouldn't want to overlook a great candidate because I omitted to ask whether they invented UDP, or whatever.

[cutemonster]

Talking about their strongest areas or inventions can be part of a structured interview.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

Doesn't that depend on what they're trying to accomplish?

If one is trying to determine the top-performing candidate (for the position being hired for), does bias actually interfere with that?

Especially considering the sorts of bias that are likely to be introduced (those adjacent to personality preferences), those who don't fit well are likely to poorly influence coworkers to a degree that negatively impacts total performance of a team.