Great Interviews, Wrong Signals: Why We Keep Hiring for the Wrong Performance

Job interviews are essential for personnel selection. Leaders trust them. They provide direct, personal interaction. You observe, question, and believe you have a strong impression.

The impression rarely matches daily work. Interviews capture an exceptional moment.

A recent Journal of Business and Psychology article highlights this. Bayón, Kleinmann, Ryan, and Heimann studied whether asking about maximum versus typical performance matters. Is the interview capturing the best moments or the everyday reality?

This issue is central for Talent Acquisition.

Interviews show candidates at their best—prepared, motivated, and strategic. They deliver polished answers, focused examples, and display their professional "Sunday self."

No one operates in Sunday mode constantly. If they did, teams would be exhausted within weeks.

Peak Performance vs. Daily Business

Research distinguishes between maximum and typical performance.

Maximum performance is what someone achieves in optimal conditions—focused, motivated, and watched. Typical performance is what they do every day—when priorities compete, and scrutiny fades. This is where interviews become interesting.

Interview ratings based on maximum-performance framing positively correlate with supervisor job performance ratings. Ratings based on typical-performance framing are negatively correlated. Impression management matters. Honest impression management weakens the negative effect for typical-performance questions.

At first, this seems illogical. Shouldn’t typical behavior questions predict job performance better? In theory, yes. In practice, it’s more complex.

“How Do You Usually Behave?”

Questions about typical behavior are more cognitively and socially demanding.

When asked, “How do you behave when…?”, candidates must cover multiple situations and give a realistic self-description. It isn’t glamorous like saving a project under stress.

Not all structured questions are effective. Structure helps, but clarity of measurement is vital.

Many interviews are structured but vague. Questions, rating dimensions, and scoring exist. Too often, the performance type stays unclear.

Typical interview questions mix several elements:

• Capability: What is someone fundamentally able to do?

• Motivation: How strongly driven are they?

• Behavior: What do they actually do in daily work?

• Self-presentation: How well can they sell their own performance?

• Context awareness: Do they understand what the organization wants to hear?

This confuses decision-making. High ratings may reflect communication skills rather than competence. Interviews become a stage. It’s not necessarily bad—still, a stage.

The University of Zurich highlights exactly this tension in its research: interviews are the most widely used selection method, yet there are concerns about whether interview ratings truly predict everyday job behavior. The high-stakes nature of interviews motivates candidates to present their best selves—meaning maximum rather than typical performance.

No moral judgment needed. Candidates follow the system. If you apply, you must convince. No one admits, "I’m usually passive-aggressive, four days a week." That’s original, but not shortlist material.

The more relevant question is:

How do we design interviews that minimize staged performance and provide job-relevant evidence?

Sprint vs. Marathon: When Which Performance Matters

Separate maximum and typical performance. Both answer distinct questions. Leaders must be deliberate.

Maximum performance is relevant for roles with peak demands, such as crisis situations, escalations, negotiations, high-stakes presentations, or complex project phases. In those cases, it makes sense to understand what someone can deliver when it really counts.

Typical performance matters more in roles needing consistency, collaboration, self-management, and reliability. Most jobs create value over time.

This leads to practical implications for recruiting:

• Set a clear objective for every interview question: maximum performance, typical performance, or context understanding.

• Don't treat peak performance answers as proof of everyday capability.

• For typical behavior, use concrete situations, timeframes, and follow-up questions.

• Evaluate answer quality and example relevance.

• Train interviewers to distinguish substance from presentation.

This sounds obvious. It is not.

Most organizations focus interviewer training on compliance and question formats—important, but not enough. Treat interview design as diagnostic, not just a conversation with notes. Start a good interview with: “What performance are we predicting?” Not “What should we ask?”

From Movie Trailer to Series

Take a leadership role. A classic question might be:

“Tell me about a situation where you successfully led a difficult team through change.”

This targets maximum performance and invites a success story. It’s valuable, but only reflects a peak moment.

A typical performance question would look different:

“How do you ensure, in a normal working week, that a diverse team with competing priorities remains effective?”

Follow-ups become critical:

“What do you do regularly? What do you deliberately not do? How do you notice when things are not working? When do you intervene?”

The difference is clear. The first question seeks the movie trailer. The second asks about the series. Most work happens in series.

What This Means in an AI-Driven Hiring World

AI-supported recruiting makes this more relevant. As CVs, applications, and interview preparation become more polished through AI, the surface quality improves. That is not fraud, but it makes it harder to distinguish real behavioral patterns from well-prepared narratives. Interviews remain important. Improved interviews are now essential.

Four principles help:

Focus on real work situations.

Not abstract competencies, but concrete scenarios from the role. Measuring “stakeholder management” by asking about it leads to PowerPoint answers. A better approach: describe a messy, realistic situation and ask how the candidate would act in the next ten working days.

Go deeper, every time.

Strong candidates can deliver convincing headlines. What matters are the mechanics underneath. What exactly was done? Who was involved? What alternatives were rejected? What were the consequences?

Use behavior-anchored rating scales.

A simple 1–5 scale feels objective, but it often isn't. Better are concrete behavioral anchors that define what strong, average, or weak looks like.

Don’t rely only on interviews.

Use interviews as one data point. Add work samples, case studies, references, and realistic job previews.

The goal isn’t to “catch” candidates. The goal is to generate better evidence to inform hiring decisions and identify candidates who fit the role requirements.

Recruiting is not forensic science with a calendar invite. It is about making decisions more fair, valid, and transparent.

A Simple Interview Audit

Talent Acquisition teams: move interview design beyond comfort. Challenge existing habits.

Less: “What questions do hiring managers like?” More: “What questions produce reliable decision signals?”

A simple audit checklist:

• What competencies do we actually want to assess?

• Which of them shows up in maximum performance?

• Which show up in typical daily behavior?

• Which questions mainly produce success stories?

• Where are we missing follow-ups on real behavior routines?

• Which rating criteria are truly observable?

• Where do we confuse eloquence with capability?

• What additional methods could complement interview ratings?

Precision, not length, makes interviews better.

They improve by becoming more precise and focused on the key performance indicators required for the role.

The Uncomfortable Truth

Structured interviews are valuable but require deliberate design to remain valid.

Otherwise, organizations just measure interviewing skills.

And that is a skill.

And that is a skill—just not always the one needed for the job. The key takeaway: design interviews to measure relevant performance, not just interview skills.

The uncomfortable insight is this: Interviews do not tell the whole story.

They show a behavioral sample under very specific conditions. Anyone trying to infer everyday work from that must carefully ask questions, assess evidence, and combine it.

Or, more simply:

If we want to understand how someone works every day, we should not only ask how they once slayed a dragon.

We should also understand how they organize their Monday, handle friction on Tuesday, and stay professional on Friday when everyone else is already halfway into the weekend.

That is where job performance is created.

Not just in moments of brilliance—but in patterns.