Panel interviews—three, four, or five interviewers all interviewing one candidate simultaneously—are a fairly common technique. You’ll note that we don’t have one in our recommended final interview schedule.

Do not use panel interviews, ever. They are the most common form of interviewing stupidity of which we are aware.

Since they are so common, you may be faced with deciding whether or not to use them. Here’s why you should not use panel interviews.

Reason Why Not #1: The Right Way

The way to conduct all interviews is one interviewer interviewing one candidate. The reason for this is the primary engine of great interviewers: The result of each interview is a hiring decision. Either the interviewer decides to recommend hiring or not. Your recommendation to the hiring manager is the equivalent of “I would hire this person.” Period.

If you are interviewing a candidate, you are not contributing to someone else’s decision on the hiring. You are deciding yourself to hire or not hire. The burden of this recommendation responsibility is enormous. Good hiring builds organizations; bad hiring destroys organizations.

The vast majority of corporate interviews are ineffective and inefficient, because the interviewer lacks the responsibility to make a decision and the training/knowledge to conduct an effective interview.

Many managers or interviewers would say at this point: “Well, okay, but that’s just not the way it works in my firm. Several of us interview a candidate, and we tell our boss (or whoever the hiring manager is) what we think, and she makes the decision.”

This is a common mistake of hiring manager guidance to other interviewers: not clearly setting the responsibility of a hiring decision with each interviewer. But that doesn’t mean you as an interviewer can’t take the effective approach and interview as if you had to hire this person yourself, in the next hour. Very few managers would say, Well, if that’s my responsibility, I want to [as would happen in a panel interview] cede 50–60–70 percent of the data I’m going to gather to a bunch of other people’s questions . . . especially others whom I’m pretty sure don’t know what they’re doing and won’t feel the same sense of responsibility that I do.

If you have to make the hiring decision—and don’t kid yourself, you do—you ought not be sharing the limited time of an interview with others who don’t care as much as you do.

Any halfway decent interviewer doesn’t want to have to listen to a bunch of dumb questions or allow a candidate to ramble incessantly because someone else on the panel isn’t smart enough to know that the clock is your enemy. And you’re not going to get any better as an interviewer listening to worse questions than you yourself could ask. You might as well play tennis with someone not as good as you in the hopes of improving your game.

Reason Why Not #2: Loss of Multiple Effective Perspectives

Often panel interviews are touted as allowing more “perspective” on a candidate. One person asks a question, but many people listen to the answer and then share their perspectives. In fact, panel interviews do just the opposite: they decrease perspective.

First, if you and I are interviewing together, I have to make a decision based on your questions. Yes, you may ask a question that I wouldn’t . . . but the vast majority of questions asked in interviews today are horrible. What good is saving time (one of the reasons for panel interviews) only to listen to time-wasting questions?

There’s also the chance that we don’t understand the rationale for another’s question. How do we evaluate the answer? Imagine that someone asked a question you wouldn’t have asked, you actually liked the answer, and the questioner tells you later that that answer was the reason he eliminated the candidate.

What if a panelist asks a good question, and there are so many bad probes and interjections you never get to ask the probes you need to find out whether the candidate has or does not have what you need to say yes or no?

More perspectives based on bad questions and surface responses create more ineffective, shallow perspectives. Panel interviews create the wrong kind of perspectives.

Reason Why Not #3: Negative Correlation to Effectiveness

We could have easily made this guidance much shorter by simply stating the data/facts:

• Panel interviews do not increase the number of true positive hires. True positives are hires that are made and turn out to be effective. Panel interviews do not help us identify good candidates.
• Panel interviews do increase the number of false positive hires. Panel interviews tend to create more situations where candidates are hired who should not have been. The general conclusion I draw from this is that panels diminish the likelihood of the in-depth knowledge that helps panelists decide to stand their ground on why someone isn’t a good fit.

Reason Why Not #4: Candidates Hate Them

Hate is not too strong a word. Panel interviews are more stressful for candidates, taking them from eustress to distress. Candidates describe them as overbearing, unpredictable, and unfair. Job candidates say they understand they have to be interviewed, but an interview in most candidates’ minds is one on one. More interviewers stacks the deck against them. To do that, in the service of efficiency for the hiring company, feels like piling on.

Here’s the gruesome bottom line: Greater percentages of candidates who are made offers from companies who use panel interviews turn those offers down, all things being equal.

Why be more efficient at the expense of effectiveness?

Don’t do panel interviews. They don’t work, and candidates hate them. Whenever you’re doing something really important, making any choice that substitutes efficiency for effectiveness is a bad idea.

But what if you’re told you “have to”? Panel interviews are widespread despite their lack of effectiveness.

There are a number of factors to consider in this situation. Consider your political capital, whether HR has a great deal of control, and your level of trust in your HR Business Partner (HRBP), among others. At a high level, make sure that you understand the difference between a fellow manager saying, “That’s how it’s done here” and “Panel interviews are mandatory.”

Far too many managers give up control of their hiring process because they mistake “that’s how it’s done” with “mandatory.” Many managers have a lot more leeway to do things their own way when they hear, “That’s how it’s done.” It’s often the case that “That’s how it’s done” is another way of saying, “Lots of managers here don’t have their own process for hiring, and don’t want to push back on panel interviews.”

We would even argue that “Panel interviews are mandatory” isn’t a requirement to conduct a panel. Again, it depends on who’s saying it, what the culture is, and how much power HR has.

This all boils down to whether you believe you must conduct a panel interview or not.

If you don’t have to, don’t. We hope the case we made earlier is sufficient motivation. Schedule your interviews as we suggested in Chapter 12.

If you must, support it minimally. Arrange your interviewing day well in advance, and include one spot for the panel. Notify HR of what the time slot is. Let them arrange everything around what you’re doing. (It disappoints us when HR says hiring managers are in charge of their hiring, and then insists that the panel interview take precedence over all other activities, and then moves the panel time slot one or two times, and then takes two or three—or even five—days to “gather” panel data.)

You’ll have to change the guidance you give slightly in your in-briefing, informing candidates that they will have a panel interview which won’t follow the general approach you’ll have laid out for them. Do not in any way, however, disparage the panel interview. There’s a difference between not using its conclusions and airing organizational dirty laundry in front of candidates.

We generally recommend against having any of your direct reports participate on the panel. It’s a waste of time, usually, because the questions that are asked won’t be core to the skills you’ve determined are most relevant for your hire. But it may be politically useful to not push back when HR requests one of your directs to be on the panel.

If you do allow one of your directs to serve on the panel, also schedule them to conduct their own separate interviews using your preplanned questions. Tell them to ask the minimum number of questions they can during the panel and to avoid sharing strong opinions during any panel discussions. It’s unlikely that the panel results will happen the day of the interview, so it won’t matter. You’ll have made your decision (and communicated it, I hope) before “the panel’s opinion” is communicated.

If for some reason HR allows you to set up the panel, put some of your directs on it who aren’t ready to interview. Give them some of the questions your actual interviewers will use. Tell them this is an opportunity to practice asking questions, taking notes, probing for behaviors, and making hiring decisions, without the weight of the actual responsibility.

Reason Why Not #5: They’re Not Safer

Panel interviews are sometimes argued for as a “safer” alternative than a series of 1-to-1 interviews. Somehow it’s unsafe for someone to interview someone else alone. Somehow we all need a nanny, a minder. There’s the fear that the interviewee will be able to make a claim that the interviewer engaged in some sort of nefarious, illicit, unprofessional, or illegal behavior.

By this logic, any company who forbade by policy any 1-to-1 interviewing would similarly ban all two-person meetings.

To be clear, this issue isn’t legal: There are no codified prohibitions against 1-to-1 interviews. (And rest assured it happens all the time at the executive level.) What any such policy does is address the risk of some sort of accusation.

If you want to assess the risk of 1-to-1 interviews, scour the legal world for cases involving claims made in 1-to-1 interviews. They’re virtually nonexistent. There are so many other things we’re doing differently than the average manager that the “safety” benefit of panel interviews doesn’t exist:

• Our job description suggests high standards.
• We will have reviewed résumés to significantly narrow down the applicant pool.
• We will have phone screened to further narrow the pool.
• At this point the risk of a problem is miniscule, but we go still further:
  • Every interviewer will be asking the same questions. Verbatim.
  • Every interviewer will have been trained, which will include interview risk factors.
  • Every interviewer will be required to support his or her hiring recommendations only with behaviors in the interview.

1-to-1 interviews aren’t really risky, but even if you accept that they might be, all these steps will indemnify you. And if you’re still worried, panels aren’t the answer anyway.