Remote Interview Techniques

Interviews are like first dates - everyone is on their best behaviour. Vet candidates before the interview and stop wasting time on the wrong hires. These 5 options will help you do that: 1. Audit Their Digital Footprint • Check LinkedIn & beyond. • Do they engage professionally or post recklessly? • How do they interact with others? A candidate’s online presence says more than their resume ever will. 2. Use Smart Pre-Interview Tests • Personality Tests – Big Five, MBTI (work style) • Cognitive Tests – Problem-solving, logical reasoning • Someone can sound great in an interview and flop when the real work begins. 3. Run Strategic Reference Checks • Find mutual LinkedIn connections. • Ask: “Would you rehire them? Why or why not?” • Dig into work ethic, integrity & collaboration. People's real reputation lives in their network. 4. Gamify the Screening Process - Want real insights? Watch them in action. • Role-play challenges • Crisis simulations • Team-based problem-solving    How someone reacts under pressure tells you more than a scripted answer ever will. 5. Leverage AI-powered tools - AI can see what you can’t. • Cultural fit • Emotional intelligence • Behavior patterns ✅ Save this post. 🔁 Repost to help others hire smarter. 👥 Follow Ani Filipova for more content.

One of my best hires almost didn't happen. She was quiet in the interview. Reserved. Didn't sell herself well. Something told me there was more to her story. So instead of writing her off, I invited her to do a small paid project with the team. Her work was exceptional. So were her collaboration skills. It was like watching a completely different person. That's when I learned that interviews and actual job performance have almost nothing to do with each other. Laszlo Bock, ex-SVP of People Operations at Google, puts it bluntly: "Interviews are a terrible predictor of performance." He's right. So I flipped the process. I stopped using interviews to assess candidates. Now I use them to sell. On the call, I ask about their dream job, their five-year goals, what motivates them, what they can't stand. I learn everything I can about what they want. Then I pitch the role around that. The actual assessment happens through what I call a discovery project. A paid, short engagement (usually a day or two) where the candidate does work that simulates the role. For a salesperson, that might be three mock sales calls and a follow-up email. For a marketing lead, an analysis of current efforts with a proposed 30-day plan. The discovery project reveals something no interview can: how the candidate actually works alongside your team. You see their thinking in real time. You feel the skill integration, or the lack of it. For team flow, skill integration is everything. Van den Hout's research on team flow identifies high skill integration as a core precondition. Everyone on the team needs roughly comparable and complementary high-level skills. You can't assess that by asking behavioral questions across a desk. For higher-level roles, I extend the process. A one-day discovery project, then a one-month discovery period, then a full-time offer. The volume drops. When I was bad at recruiting, I'd get 100+ applications per role. Now I'll have under 10 candidates, sometimes under 5, before making the hire. Quality over quantity. Every time.

A candidate can now show up with a clean GitHub, a polished portfolio, and a take-home that passes every test — and still stall in week two. That's not a candidate problem. The artifacts got cheap to produce, and the capability question sits exactly where it always did. At Pragra we run project-based programs with mentors watching people work. The moment that tells us the most is when the instructions run out and someone has to decide what to do next. Four things we'd look for if we were sitting on your side of the table: 1. Ask about a decision they reversed. Capability shows up in the revision, not the finished result. 2. Break something in their own project and debug it together. Their code, your bug, twenty minutes. 3. Hand them a deliberately ambiguous requirement. Watch whether they assume, or ask — and who they'd ask. 4. Ask what they're still weak at. People who've been mentored can name the gap precisely. People coached only for interviews usually can't. Where this fails: it takes longer than a resume screen, and it punishes nervous people unless you send the format ahead of time. Do that. You're assessing capability, not tolerance for surprise. What's the skill you find hardest to assess before someone actually starts? #TechHiring #SkillsBasedHiring

Stop interviewing. Start hiring. In the traditional hiring process, we've been conditioned to believe that interviews are the golden key to picking the right candidate. But what if we flip the script? Consider this: Interviews can be misleading. People often prepare rehearsed answers, presenting an image that might not truly represent their professional capabilities or fit for the role. A polished exterior doesn't always equate to a competent interior. Instead, try focusing on 'job auditions.' This means allowing potential hires to perform tasks they would be doing in the actual job. A programmer can code a module, a salesperson can prepare a sales pitch. This provides a more realistic assessment of their skills. Think of it as a 'try before you buy' approach. You might find that the quiet candidate who didn't shine in the interview is the one who excels when it comes to actual work. The talkative, charismatic interviewee might falter when put to the task. No more relying on gut feelings. No more regretful hires. Remember, it's not about how well they can talk about the job; it's about how well they can do the job. So next time you're hiring, consider ditching the interviews and go straight for the auditions. Share your thoughts on this approach. Would you consider job auditions over traditional interviews?

I stopped interviewing alone. Not because I lost confidence in my judgment — but because Claude has quietly become the best interview partner I've ever had. The workflow is simple. Zoom transcribes every interview. Claude is connected directly to my Zoom, so the moment a call ends, it can pull the transcript on its own — no copy-paste, no uploading, no manual handoff. I just point Claude at the candidate's resume and say "assess." Within minutes, Claude produces a detailed HTML assessment for each candidate — ratings across every dimension I care about, evidence quoted directly from the transcript, strengths, red flags, and the follow-up questions I should ask in the next round. One self-contained file per candidate that I can share with my hiring team in a click. A few things changed once I made the switch: → It catches my blind spots. On almost every candidate, Claude surfaces 1–2 observations I missed in the room — a subtle tenure pattern, a quote that contradicted an earlier claim, a strength I under-weighted because it sat outside my usual lens. → It validates my gut without flattering it. Most of the time Claude's read aligns with mine, which gives me more conviction. When it disagrees, the disagreement is specific enough that I can re-examine the tape instead of just trusting the vibe. → Cross-candidate comparison gets honest. For recent roles, Claude built a single HTML scorecard ranking finalists across 12 dimensions side-by-side. The recency bias that usually favors the last person I spoke to disappeared. → I leave every interview with a sharper next round. Claude drafts the follow-up question list, the reference-check probes, and the specific things to test in a working session. What used to take an hour of post-interview reflection now takes ten minutes. → The artifact is shareable. A clean, interactive HTML scorecard — with quotes, ratings, and recommended next steps — beats a Google Doc summary every time. My hiring team gets a higher-quality read than I would have written by hand, and I get my evenings back. → The hiring bar is more consistent. Same rubric, same rigor, every candidate — no matter how tired or distracted I was that day. The unlock isn't just the model. It's that Claude lives where my work lives — Zoom, my files, my docs — so the friction between "interview ended" and "assessment in hand" is basically zero. Hiring is the single highest-leverage decision a CEO makes. It's also the one where most of us run on pattern-matching and gut feel. Claude doesn't replace either — it makes both sharper. Curious how others are using AI in their hiring loop — what's actually working for you?