Slightly OT - on hiring, not interviewing - I recently realized what could improve hiring, and it's simultaneously a great and terrible idea.
How does hiring work today? First, the employer sets out a "careers" page (which varies quite a bit, even within the same company, even for the same job title!) which includes the following banal information: A job title, part-time/full-time/remote/location-based, a company values blurb, a paragraph about the general responsibilities of anyone with this job title, a tech stack, a list of prerequisites that nobody will ever meet "or relevant experience", and maybe the benefits and perks.
Nowhere does it describe the actual project they're working on, their timelines, what kind of situation you're walking into, what the specific team's culture is like, whether there's a strong team lead or everyone is just a genius, if they're culturally diverse, what their daily workflow is, whether their OKRs have sustainability or social responsibility goals, or feedback from team members. Is the project they're working on greenfield or brownfield? What's the architecture? Will you be on-call? Will you be supporting customers or working in a silo? What is the reporting structure like? Career advancement / lateral movement? Training? Do they go to happy hour on Fridays? Is there an LGBTQ ERG?
And from the other side, the company knows next to nothing about who's applying. After all the candidates have played tech buzzword bingo in their resumes, the company (or worse, recruiter) pulls out a divining rod and tries to pick up the one or two candidates who they imagine are a match culturally, technically, and professionally. If you don't know somebody inside the company, or a recruiter doesn't push you as one of the two candidates they've found locally, you might as well be a translucent blob of Arial 12-point font.
How can we connect employees and employers in a meaningful way that isn't an arbitrary screening process? Well it seems to me that somebody has already come up with an answer: dating sites.
Please, stop throwing things at me and hear me out! What are jobs? Relationships between an employee and an employer. Well, dating sites are masters at finding the intersections where people match, in order to find good relationship matches. You can create a curated list of multiple-choice weighted questions, and ask the other person to fill them out, with a small text blurb to elaborate on your answer. The most common/popular ones automatically bubble up for everybody as default questions.
This combination of quantitative and qualitative matching would allow people to quickly see which employees/employers are the best match. We may still need a way to ascertain technical skill or professional experience, but at least the people who come in the door would appear to be the closest matches to what we want. Will there be some catfishing? Sure, but there already is with today's hiring mess! Can somebody please make the OkCupid of hiring? I'm waiting to open my account.