Most interview loops are polite improv. Smart people demonstrate comfort with ambiguity, and then everyone emails adjectives. The companies that hire well treat interviewing as a small scientific instrument: few moving parts, calibrated outputs, and a protocol that can survive an urgent hiring manager and a bad night's sleep.
Three pillars carry the weight: structure, real work, and shared judgment.
Structure first. A structured loop means the same prompts for the same role, with time"‘boxed segments and a rubric that scores observable behavior, not vibes. If your rubric includes "culture fit," translate it into specifics: collaboration under pressure, clarity of written communication, ownership of failure. Now define what "meets" looks like"”a sentence or two per category that an interviewer can check without overthinking.
Real work next. Portfolio reviews and open"‘ended design chats are not useless, but they correlate weakly with the thing you actually need: whether this human can do the job here. Replace opinion theater with a work sample that mirrors reality: a small PR with a description of a messy bug, a design brief with a cranky constraint, a take"‘home that is time"‘boxed to protect candidates from a weeklong unpaid sprint.
Shared judgment last. Calibration sessions once a month keep the instrument honest. Review a small set of anonymized feedback forms, compare scores, discuss where rubrics drifted, and adjust prompts accordingly. Nobody should be a permanent outlier without a conversation.
Anecdotes from practice:
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Our best predictive signal for senior engineers was not leetcode"‘style puzzles; it was a "debug this flaky integration test" exercise with a repo that had one intentional dependency mismatch and one sneaky race. Candidates who named unknowns, wrote a small log, and proposed a rollback path tended to thrive in production. Candidates who got lost in cleverness often struggled.
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For product managers, a "write the decision memo" prompt beat brainstorms. Given a short scenario and a data table with an inconvenient hole, we asked for a two"‘page recommendation with alternatives and risks. We learned how they reasoned under scarcity, how they wrote for time"‘pressed readers, and whether they defaulted to experiments when certainty was impossible.
Kindness is not an add"‘on here; it is how you get real signal. Tell candidates what to expect, share the rubric at a high level, and give them the option to ask for a brief break if the room gets too hot. You will not make your process "too easy"; you will make your data better.
Case notes
Meta"‘analyses consistently show that structured interviews and work samples outperform unstructured chats in predictive validity.