Job interviews are a pointless waste of everyone’s time – they should be abolished

It often seems that more normal job interviews are set up to favour people who are good at interviews as opposed to people who might be good at a job

Something good will have come from the job interview from hell that made a viral sensation of Olivia Bland if it sparks a wider conversation about a painful process we nearly all go through at some point during our lives.

You would hope that the sort of character assassination Bland reported that she endured while seeking a job at an IT company is rare. But is it?

Too often the process of interviewing for a job feels like an exercise in psychological torture.

“What is your weak point,” the questioner will say, setting a trap by utilising a cliche, presumably in an effort to find out how you respond under pressure.

I’ve had that one. Try and turn it around and make it a positive, say the books that you can buy on the subject, or the career websites you can peruse in return for giving their cookies a truckload of data on your Amazon buying habits.

To the question the interviewer has read in some manual called “How to Find a Great Employee,” the candidate will respond with what they’ve read in “How to Win at Interviews”.

I suppose finding evidence that a candidate has read the latter shows they care enough to do their research when they respond to that question with: “Well I’m a bit of a perfectionist”.

But really – stock questions, stock answers, and two hours of misery. Do they really tell anyone anything meaningful?

You can, of course, always find someone who can come up with a new and spectacularly stupid twist on the curveball question.

As well as physical tests at the annual NFL Scouting Combine, prospective players attend interviews with teams. During one of them Derrius Guice, a running back who was ultimately picked by Washington in the second round of the draft, claimed he was asked if he “liked men” and if his mother “sells herself”.

The NFL launched an investigation and – surprise, surprise – found no proof. But it isn’t the first such report of questionable practices to emerge from the process.

It often seems that more normal job interviews are set up to favour people who are good at interviews as opposed to people who might be good at a job.

Everyone has a story of the person they once worked with who was utterly useless and yet who presumably sailed through the hiring process with flying colours.

The City of London is full of them. Friends of mine who work in the financial centre bemoan the fact that they earn their crusts at places that are “full of useless posh t**ts” on big bucks.

I’ve met some of the people they complain about, and they’re right.

Of course, the old school-tie network helps to explain this. But the HR departments of modern City firms tend to frown upon Perkins being handed a job purely because he hit a century for the first XI at the Old Boys’ day.

As a result, he and most of his peers will have also gone through an interview at some point, even if it was rigged.

Confidence, and the ability to ace interviews, are things even the most useless of posh t**ts tend not to be short of. Boris Johnson got several jobs in journalism before he managed to find a constituency dozy enough to elect him. Just saying.

“I have met many people since I was elected who earn way more than £30,000 who have literally no discernible skills,” said Labour MP Jess Phillips, in an epic takedown of the minimum salary our wretched government wants to impose on prospective migrants. “I have met some people who have earned huge amounts of money who I wouldn’t let hold my pint.”

More evidence that the interview process is flawed, along with Guice’s experience, along with Bland’s experience? Sure looks that way.

The message to millennials seems to be that you can get a job if you’re confident and show willingness to have some overpaid suit spitting at you for a couple of hours.

Surely it would be better to simply try and engage in a conversation. It strikes me that interviewers would get more out of people, and find out more about them, through putting them at ease and establishing a rapport.

Modern HR people will tell you that. yes, that’s just what they try to do. But modern Britain is full of people with their heads firmly up the backside of the past, as Bland’s report of her experience proves.

Sadly, that’s not just true of job interviews, as we’re all learning to our great cost.