How do you drink your water? Secret tests in interviews highlight ‘broken’ hiring process
How do you drink your water?
A viral Reddit thread recently sparked debate over an unusual trend in hiring: secret tests used by recruiters to evaluate candidates.
Among the strangest: judging a prospective employee by how quickly they drink a glass of water — the thinking being that you can tell a lot about someone who drinks too fast or too slowly, or refuses the offer of a sip altogether.
With skills-based hiring a growing focus of recruiters, such questionable tactics highlight a critical issue facing HR leaders: dubious interview methods that, at the end of the day, fail in tapping the most qualified candidates.
“Organizations need to ditch the gimmicky secret tests in interviews,” said Shanna Milford, head of HR for the Americas at Iris Software Group, a business software and services provider. “It’s a symptom of a much bigger problem: broken hiring processes that ignore real talent.”
Andy Nelesen, solutions lead for talent acquisition at SHL, a talent acquisition and management support firm, emphasizes that structured interviews significantly outperform gut-based hiring methods. “The interview process is long overdue for reinvention,” he said. “With around 4 billion interviews conducted each year, organizations waste precious time and resources on outdated interview methods that fail to reveal true candidate potential and fit.”
The data backs that up. According to the Journal for Applied Psychology, it takes four unstructured interviews to achieve the same predictive accuracy as a single structured interview.
The traditional hiring system is failing both prospective employees and companies, according to Checkr, a company that conducts background interviews on job candidates. In a survey of 3,000 job seekers, it found that some 3 in 5 applicants see securing a job interview through a job board as “nearly impossible.” Two-thirds of job seekers applied for seemingly active positions that were no longer available. More than 4 in 5 say such experiences create “an extreme lack of trust” between talent and employer.
With job boards losing their effectiveness, candidates are turning elsewhere. In the Checkr survey, nearly half of respondents said they use social media to discover job openings often unavailable on traditional platforms.
Meanwhile, the interview experience is increasingly important to job seekers. “Candidates view interviews as the most consequential step of their employment search process,” Nelesen said. “They gear up for these moments with research, preparation and planning. If their enthusiasm isn’t reciprocated by the interviewer, candidates may become deeply disappointed.”
Milford recommends that with skills-based hiring a priority, companies should be using structured interviews and clear criteria to ensure consistency and fairness in assessing a candidate’s abilities. That approach means:
Organizing interviews around skills, competencies, and behaviors required for the role;
Delivering assessments consistently and fairly;
Prioritizing a candidate’s skills, potential and adaptability; and
Using analytics to improve the interview process.
As for those secret tests, what makes them particularly problematic is their arbitrary nature. Nelesen has seen countless hiring managers who believe they have a “magic question” that uniquely differentiates candidates. “There is no data to support their utility, candidates generally react poorly to these questions they feel aren’t relevant, and they end up just wasting time,” he said.
So, for HR managers facing a highly competitive market for talent and with the interview process so important in landing the right people, could it be time once and for all to forego the gimmicks?
As Nelesen puts it, “It’s time for a new generation of interviewing, powered by science and analytics, that delivers real results.”