The Problem with Job Interviews

By George Waggott, founder, and Roberto Fonseca-Velazquez, law student,

George Waggott Law

A new study by BrightHire and Harvard Business School’s “Managing the Future of Work project” has analyzed over 23,000 interview transcripts from 44 companies and 1,311 roles to uncover systemic flaws in hiring practices. The research reveals a significant disconnect between job descriptions and actual interview content, suggesting that interviews are frequently not effectively selecting candidates for roles.

While interviews appear to cover most listed skills—80% after one interview and 91% after two—this surface-level coverage masks deeper issues. The study found that meaningful assessment of skills is inconsistent. Soft skills like communication and collaboration are thoroughly evaluated in 76% of cases, but technical skills and experience requirements are deeply assessed only 55% and 66% of the time, respectively, even after five interviews. This suggests that hiring processes often fail to rigorously vet candidates on the most critical qualifications.

Redundancy is another notable issue. Skills that are well-covered early on are frequently revisited in later interviews, with each skill addressed an average of 1.2 additional times. This repetition indicates that interviewers may be spending time rehashing the same topics rather than expanding the scope of their evaluation. Whether due to lack of structure or overemphasis on select skills, this inefficiency risks hiring underqualified candidates. It also begs the question about why numerous interviews are conducted.

Structured questioning plays a pivotal role in addressing the disconnect between desired scope of interviews and actual practice. Skills explicitly asked about are well-covered only 53% of the time, while those never asked about are almost entirely ignored (1.6%). When combining well and partially-covered skills, asked-about topics are addressed 95.9% of the time, compared to just 11.5% for unasked ones. This highlights the importance of intentional questioning and suggests that candidates should proactively mention key qualifications, especially if interviewers overlook them.

The BrightHire / HBS study also exposes a major blind spot in assessing artificial intelligence (AI) skills. Despite AI’s growing importance, only 2.2% of interviews in 2025 included direct questions about AI experience and skills, up only slightly from 0.4% in 2024. Even after three interviews, 93% of candidates were never asked about their AI related-roles or skillset. Interestingly, the roles most likely to include AI-related questions shifted from marketing in 2024 to HR and recruiting in 2025, reflecting AI’s increasing role in talent acquisition.

When AI is discussed, questions typically fall into six categories: daily usage, tool familiarity, workflow integration, software development assistance, strategic perspective, and prompt engineering. However, these conversations remain rare, representing missed opportunities to identify candidates who could both drive AI adoption and contribution to organizational success.

To address these issues, the report recommends several actions for organizations:

1.  Implement structured interview guides to ensure comprehensive skill coverage.

2. Audit job descriptions against actual interview content.

3. Integrate AI assessments into hiring practices.

4. Reduce redundancy by assigning specific skill areas to different interviewers.

5. Train interviewers to conduct thorough and systematic evaluations.

   
   

Ultimately, the study concludes that flawed hiring processes can lead to missed talent and poor hiring decisions. These problems are solvable through intentional design, better interviewer training, and technology-enabled solutions. By aligning interviews with job requirements, companies can improve hiring outcomes and build more capable, future-ready teams.

For more information about George Waggott Law, please see: www.georgewaggott.com, or contact: george@georgewaggott.com