Unless you're talking about a very high-level position that either requires substantial leadership traits or very specialized knowledge, interviewing has never been about finding the right person for the job, it's been about finding a right person for the job. The reality is that most jobs can be done successfully by a large number of people. The accuracy of the assessment of the candidate's abilities is, to my mind, a secondary concern in the interview process and yet, just as in this study, is the only part of the interview process studied and critiqued.
But what I find far more important in the interview process is involving current team members in the process of selecting new coworkers. It's one way of getting teams to be bought into a feeling of shared purpose and is the first step in establishing a working relationship. If you don't give at least some of the current team a role in the hiring process, teams will feel imposed upon by those hiring and won't be as understanding about flaws in those added to the teams.
Focusing on selecting the "right candidate" is really myopic in a situation where there are likely many right candidates. We should, instead, be focusing on not selecting a wrong candidate and fostering the right team dynamic. We already know that strong teams significantly outperform strong individual performers who don't cooperate. Yet hiring still seems focused on optimizing for strong individual contributions. And I've yet to see a study that looks at the flaws of the interview process in building ineffective teams.
I think you may be misconstruing the argument here. I agree that any number of people will fit -- but the problem is, what if interviews aren't even selecting "a" right person for the job?
> what if interviews aren't even selecting "a" right person for the job?
We know that interviews are selecting a right person some percentage of the time. That percentage will never be 0 or 100. We will always have to accept some bad hires.
I would rather that successful hire percentage be somewhat lower and keep the team engaged in defining culture and hiring standards than to give up team involvement for a higher right-person rate.
My main point is that the people studying this issue and arguing against the interview process tend to only look at less than half of the benefit of the interview process. If we're going to ditch the interview process, whatever replaces it needs to have the same property of involving the existing team or it is, to my mind, automatically worse than what we have now. Because while we're all aware of how flawed the interview process can be, it does work to some extent. When I was hiring, only 2 out of the 50 or so that I hired didn't work out. Would I like to have avoided hiring one or both of them? Sure. Am I willing to sacrifice the team involvement benefits to got to do so? Absolutely not.
