If you’ve been hiring recently, you’ve likely run into a frustrating paradox. Your applicant volume is at an all-time high, yet finding the right person feels harder than ever.
You’re not alone. According to ManpowerGroup, 72% of employers report struggling to find skilled candidates despite this massive influx of applications.
Why is this happening? Because the top of our hiring funnel is fundamentally compromised.
LinkedIn’s 2026 Talent Research reveals that 81% of candidates use or plan to use AI in their job search.
As a result, candidate resumes are flawless. They’re highly polished, perfectly optimized, and (unfortunately) often mask a candidate's true competency. Traditional resume screening has lost its predictive validity.
The interview’s role has evolved to be your ultimate reality check. If you don’t know how to run a truly effective interview (if your architecture is flawed, unstructured, or biased), you’ll misinterpret the signals and make catastrophic hiring decisions.
At Elevate Leadership, we know that management is learned, and interviewing is a critical management muscle. In this guide, we’re going to walk you through the 3 stages of conducting an effective interview so you can confidently hire the best talent for your team.
3 Stages of Effective Interviews
Below we break down the mechanics of an effective interview into 3 distinct stages: Preparation, During, and After. Let's start with the most overlooked stage.
Preparation: Being Aware of Your Unconscious Bias Before You Start Interviewing
You can’t “wing” a high-stakes interview. The preparation phase is about getting your head in the game and, most importantly, putting guardrails in place against your own brain.
First, re-read their resume right before the meeting. Whatever information you have access to, whether it’s a resume or a LinkedIn profile, take a look in advance. Never read about their background in real-time while they’re talking to you. If you do, you’re not actively listening, building trust, and the candidate will immediately sense that you’re disengaged.
Second, prep your small talk in advance. This might sound excessive. We all use small talk to build rapport at the start of a meeting. But in an interview, standard small talk is a minefield for unconscious hiring bias.
When you ask questions like, “What hobbies do you have?” or “Where did you go on vacation this summer?” or “What did you do this weekend?”, you’re opening the door directly to affinity bias.
This is the psychological tendency to favor candidates who share similar backgrounds, experiences, interests, or personality traits with us and conversely, to think poorly of those who don’t. If they spent the weekend doing the exact same hobby you love, your brain will unconsciously give them a higher score before the actual interview even begins.
Furthermore, casual small talk can accidentally solicit information about a protected class. You never want to put a candidate in a position where they reveal details about their age, religion, sexual orientation, or national ancestry during a casual warmup chat.
Instead, prepare neutral, safe questions to build rapport. For example:
- "What’s the weather like where you are today?"
- "What do you really like about living in [their city]?"
- "How has the interview process been going for you so far?"
Preparation is about setting yourself up to evaluate the candidate's actual skills, not just how much you have in common with them.
During: Uncovering the Reality of The Interviewee
Now you’re in the room (or on the video call). Your small talk was neutral, and your biases are in check. How do you actually run the conversation to get past the AI-polished surface?
1. Give a Thoughtful Introduction
Set the tone immediately. Introduce yourself and the company in a way that makes sense for your organizational culture, and give the candidate a chance to do the same. For example, you may use a nickname versus your given name, or you may want to include your pronouns. This signals company inclusivity and establishes a baseline of psychological safety, allowing the candidate to relax and give you their best performance.
2. Ask Situational, Not Hypothetical Questions
This is the core of an effective interview. Good interview questions are situational (often referred to as Behavioral Interviewing). They’re rooted in the past, not focused on a hypothetical future state.
Here is the difference:
- Hypothetical (Avoid): "Imagine a situation where you’re in conflict with another team member. How would you handle it?"
- Situational (Do this): "Tell me about a specific time you were in conflict with a team member, and how you handled it."
Why does this matter? Because a candidate can use AI to generate a perfect, theoretical answer to a hypothetical conflict. But past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior.
Asking for specific, historical examples forces the candidate to drop the polished theory and talk about what they actually did.
3. Dig for the Full STAR
When your interviewee responds to a situational question, your job is to actively listen for or ask follow-up questions to get the complete story. We use the STAR framework to ensure we are getting empirical data, not just vague generalizations:
- S (Situation): What was the context?
- T (Task): What was the specific challenge or goal they were facing?
- A (Action): What did they specifically do? (Listen closely here—did they say "we" did it, or "I" did it?)
- R (Results): What was the outcome? Can they quantify it?
If a candidate gives you the Situation and the Action but leaves out the Result, it’s your job to pause them and ask, "And what was the final outcome of that project?" Don’t let them off the hook until you have the full STAR.
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After: Scrubbing for Interview Bias and Making the Call
The interview is over. The candidate has logged off or left the room. Now comes the most critical phase, and that is evaluating your notes and finalizing your assessment.
Most managers simply write down their "gut feeling". At Elevate, we know that your gut feeling is usually just your unconscious bias talking. Here’s how to finalize your assessment cleanly and fairly:
1. Audit Your Notes for Implicit Bias
Before you submit your feedback to the hiring manager or the ATS (Applicant Tracking System), re-read your notes. Reword your notes using bias-free language where implicit bias may have crept in.
In addition to Affinity Bias (which we discussed in the Preparation stage), here are 3 major biases to hunt for in your notes:
- Halo and Horn Effect: This is allowing one positive (Halo) or negative (Horn) attribute or accomplishment to completely overshadow all other aspects of a candidate's qualifications. Did you give them a pass on their poor technical answer just because they went to your alma mater?
- Contrast Effect: This is evaluating a candidate's qualifications differently depending on the strength or weakness of the other candidates interviewed, rather than evaluating them against the objective rubric of the role.
- Confirmation Bias: This is seeking information that confirms your initial impressions of a candidate, rather than objectively evaluating all the information they presented during the STAR questions.
- Gender Bias: This is the inclination to favor one gender over another or to make assumptions about a candidate’s competence on gender-based stereotypes.
2. Protect the Interview Panel from Biases
This is a critical, often-missed step. Re-read your notes and remove anything that could bias anyone else on the interview panel, even if it’s a detail the candidate willingly volunteered.
For example, imagine a candidate shares a highly personal story to answer a behavioral question.
Do not write something like:
“Candidate shared a compelling example of how their experience growing up as part of the LGBTQIA+ community pushed them to care about making AI that serves humanity.”
If you submit that, you’re passing demographic information into the permanent record, which could trigger the unconscious biases of the next interviewer. Instead, scrub the demographic data and focus purely on the professional outcome.
Write something like:
“Candidate shared a compelling example of how their past experiences pushed them to care about making AI that serves humanity.”
The Interview is the Ultimate Reality Check
We’re operating in a new hiring reality. With AI tools generating flawless resumes and cover letters, you can no longer rely on the top of your funnel to tell you the truth about a candidate.
The interview is your only remaining filter. It’s your ultimate reality check.
By committing to this structured, three-stage approach, you remove the guesswork. You stop relying on "gut feelings" and start relying on data.
We know that mastering the art of an effective interview is one of the most powerful skills you can build. It ensures that you aren't just filling a seat with someone who looks good on paper, but that you’re actually hiring the talent your organization needs to adapt and thrive.
