Episode
Interviewing is Broken...
or Just Exposed?
with Victoria Gates & Lorna Erickson
Everyone says interviewing is broken. But was it ever working — or did we just not have enough data to see how badly it was failing candidates and companies alike?
Victoria Gates and Lorna Erickson, co-founders of Expert Interviewers and hosts of the “Don't Tell Me About Yourself” podcast, join Des and Ashley to dissect why the interview process feels so dysfunctional right now, what a better process actually looks like, and whether the problem is structural, cultural — or just finally too visible to ignore.
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Episode Transcript
Full conversation — searchable and screen-reader friendly
Desiree: Today we are joined by Victoria Gates and Lorna Erickson of Expert Interviewers. Victoria has hired more than 1,500 people and spent years helping leaders refine how they interview. Lorna has spent nearly two decades studying what actually works for interviewers, developing case studies and testing methods through more than 5,000 interviews. Together they built Expert Interviewers. What feels most broken right now in interviewing, especially with AI in the mix?
Lorna Erickson: The most broken thing right now is that each side — candidates and hiring managers — doesn't know what they should tell the other about how they're using AI. They're holding on to that information instead of being transparent about it. How are you using AI to apply, to prep, to interview? What are our boundaries as a company? Having that conversation on the front end would make such a big difference. As long as candidates know upfront, some are actually okay with AI screening — it's on their time, when their kids are in bed. But transparency is the whole thing.
Victoria Gates: AI is breaking hiring. Except it's not. Hiring was already broken. AI is just exposing that it was already broken. The interview processes were already broken. The AI isn't the problem — your crappy interview process is. And if your AI decisions aren't explainable, it's probably because they were never explainable in the first place. You were deciding on gut feeling or making decisions off of information you shouldn't have been making decisions on anyway. We're seeing everyone rush to implement AI without asking: is the process you're applying AI to worth automating? Have you even stopped to think about that?