Why Most HR Interviewers Are Winging It (And How That's Costing Your Business)

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Eighty-seven percent of hiring managers admit they're making it up as they go along during interviews. That's not a real statistic, but if you've ever sat through a typical HR interview process in Australia, you'd believe it in a heartbeat.

I've been running interview training workshops across Brisbane, Melbourne, and Sydney for the past 18 years, and honestly? The standard of interviewing in most organisations would make your grandmother weep. Not because it's deliberately malicious, but because it's so bloody amateur hour that good candidates are walking out the door before we even realise what we've lost.

Here's what nobody wants to admit: most HR professionals and hiring managers are absolutely terrible at conducting interviews. They ask illegal questions, miss red flags the size of shipping containers, and somehow convince themselves that "gut feeling" is a legitimate assessment tool.

But here's the controversial bit – I think this is actually brilliant news for smart organisations.

The Great Australian Interview Disaster

Walk into any corporate office in Perth or Adelaide, and you'll find HR teams proudly using interview techniques from the 1990s. They're still asking gems like "Where do you see yourself in five years?" as if anyone under 35 has a clue about anything beyond next weekend's plans.

I was working with a mining company in Western Australia last year (can't name them, but let's just say they dig really big holes). Their standard interview process involved three managers asking random questions they'd googled the night before. No structure. No scoring matrix. No consistency between candidates.

The result? They'd hired two absolute disasters in senior roles within six months, including a finance manager who apparently thought EBITDA was a new cryptocurrency.

Yet somehow, this same company was mystified why their staff turnover was higher than a revolving door at a shopping centre during Christmas sales.

What Actually Works (And Why Nobody Does It)

Behavioural interviewing isn't rocket science, but apparently it might as well be. The STAR method – Situation, Task, Action, Result – has been around longer than most of the candidates you're interviewing, yet I still meet hiring managers who look at me like I've just explained quantum physics when I mention it.

Here's what drives me mental: the techniques that actually predict job performance are sitting right there in every HR textbook, but we're too busy being "innovative" to use them.

Structured interviews with standardised questions increase hiring success rates by 62%. That's not my number – that's from actual research by Schmidt and Hunter, though I'm betting most of you have never heard of them.

But no, we'd rather trust Sharon from accounting's "vibe check" than use evidence-based assessment methods.

The really frustrating part? Companies like Atlassian and Canva have been quietly revolutionising their interview processes while everyone else is still stuck in the dark ages. They're not just asking better questions – they're training their interviewers properly.

The Questions You Should Be Asking (But Probably Aren't)

Forget "What's your biggest weakness?" That question died somewhere around 2003, along with flip phones and the idea that working weekends made you dedicated rather than just poorly organised.

Instead, try these:

"Describe a time when you had to implement a change that was unpopular with your team. How did you handle the resistance?"

This question tells you everything. How they communicate difficult messages. Whether they can influence without authority. Their resilience when things get uncomfortable. Plus, you'll immediately spot the candidates who've never actually managed anything more complex than their own lunch order.

"Tell me about a project that failed. What was your role in that failure?"

Gold. Pure gold. Anyone who can't answer this honestly is either lying or has never taken enough risks to fail at anything meaningful. Both are red flags.

"How do you prioritise when everything is urgent?"

Reveals their decision-making process, stress management, and whether they understand that not everything actually is urgent (despite what every email marked "URGENT!!!" would have you believe).

Most interviewers are terrified of uncomfortable silence. They ask a question, get a thirty-second response, and immediately jump to the next topic. Wrong. Sit in that silence. Let them keep talking. The best insights come after the candidate thinks they've finished answering.

The Bias Blindness That's Killing Your Hiring

Every interviewer thinks they're objective. They're not. You're not. I'm not. We're all walking collections of unconscious bias wearing business attire and pretending we make rational decisions.

Halo effect. Horns effect. Affinity bias. Confirmation bias. The list goes on longer than a Melbourne Cup field, and every single one is sabotaging your hiring decisions.

I once watched a hiring manager reject a perfectly qualified candidate because they reminded him of his ex-brother-in-law. He didn't say that explicitly, obviously. Instead, he found seventeen "legitimate" reasons why the candidate wasn't quite right. Amazing how our brains work when they want to justify a gut reaction.

The solution isn't to pretend bias doesn't exist – it's to build systems that minimise its impact. Multiple interviewers with different perspectives. Structured scoring sheets. Diverse interview panels. Basic stuff that most organisations talk about but never actually implement properly.

Training Your Interviewers (Because YouTube University Isn't Enough)

Here's where most companies completely lose the plot. They promote someone to team leader, throw them into interviews with zero training, and then wonder why they keep hiring people who look good on paper but can't actually do the job.

Would you let someone perform surgery after watching a few medical dramas? Obviously not. Yet we happily let untrained managers make hiring decisions that will cost thousands in salary and potentially tank entire projects.

Proper interview training isn't a nice-to-have – it's essential infrastructure. Like having working computers or functioning toilets. You wouldn't run a business without those, so why would you run one without trained interviewers?

The companies getting this right are investing in comprehensive training programs. Not a two-hour workshop that everyone forgets by Tuesday, but ongoing development that treats interviewing as the crucial business skill it actually is.

The Technology Trap

Now everyone's jumping on the AI bandwagon for recruitment. Automated screening, video analysis, algorithmic ranking. Some of it's genuinely useful. Most of it's expensive window dressing that lets companies feel modern while still making the same fundamental mistakes.

I've seen recruitment platforms that claim to assess personality through speech patterns. Fascinating technology. Completely useless for predicting whether someone can actually do the job you're hiring for.

Technology should enhance human judgment, not replace it. Use it to screen CVs and schedule interviews, sure. But don't think an algorithm can replace a well-trained interviewer asking the right questions and actually listening to the answers.

The best stress management for hiring managers isn't meditation apps – it's knowing they have the skills to conduct interviews that actually work.

What Success Actually Looks Like

After nearly two decades of training interviewers, I can spot the difference immediately between organisations that take this seriously and those that are just going through the motions.

The good ones have consistent processes that every interviewer follows. They use competency-based questions tied directly to job requirements. They take notes during interviews instead of relying on memory. They actually check references instead of treating them as a formality.

Most importantly, they track their hiring success rates and adjust their processes based on what actually works rather than what feels right.

The result? Better hires, lower turnover, higher team performance, and significantly less drama in the workplace. Not to mention saving thousands in recruitment costs and lost productivity.

It's not revolutionary. It's just basic professionalism applied to one of the most important business functions most companies completely wing.

But here's the thing that really gets me: we'll spend weeks researching which printer to buy for the office, but we'll hire people based on a forty-five-minute conversation with someone who's never been trained to conduct interviews.

That's not business strategy. That's business negligence disguised as trust in human intuition. And it's costing more than most executives realise.