Are you interviewing candidates or just asking questions?

The problem isn't always the candidate. Sometimes it's how we interview them.

I've been interviewing professionals for 20 years. And there's something I keep seeing in companies of all sizes.

They interview someone for 30 or 45 minutes, ask a bunch of questions, and walk away saying:

"I wasn't completely convinced."

But what does that actually mean?

Does the person lack the necessary skills? Do they lack experience? Or did we simply fail to gather enough information during the interview to properly evaluate them?

Those are completely different things!

And this is one of the reasons why, at Pitcheers, we've developed our own interview methodology.

An interview isn't an exam

The goal of an interview shouldn't be to test whether a candidate knows how to answer certain questions. It should be to understand how they work.

What problems they've faced, what decisions they've made, what responsibilities they've taken on, and how they've achieved their results.

A candidate can answer every question perfectly, and we can still finish the interview without understanding whether they have the capabilities we're looking for.

That's why, at Pitcheers, we structure our interviews to gather evidence, not just answers.

1. Understanding their career, not repeating their resume

Instead of asking candidates to walk us through their entire resume chronologically, we start with questions like:

"What has been the most complex role you've held in your career?"

"In which position did you grow the most in terms of how you think or make decisions?"

We're trying to understand what they consider complex, what challenges they've faced, and how they've evolved professionally.

Two people can have ten years of experience and have developed completely different capabilities. Years of experience alone tell us very little.

2. Understanding what they actually did

Job titles can be misleading.

Two Senior Software Engineers can have completely different responsibilities, even when working at similar companies.

That's why we ask about their team structure, their responsibilities, and especially:

"Which decisions do you make independently, and which ones require approval?"

We want to understand how involved they were in their projects, what decisions they personally made, and what outcomes they were responsible for.

Because there's a big difference between working on a project and being responsible for delivering it.

3. Understanding how they solve problems

This is one of the most important parts of our interview.

We ask candidates to describe a complex professional problem they've had to solve.

But we don't stop at the story. We dig deeper:

How did you identify the real problem? What alternatives did you consider? How did you decide what to do? What was the outcome? How did you know your solution worked?

We're not looking for a perfect answer. We're trying to understand their judgment.

Two people can achieve the same result through completely different decision-making processes.

And understanding how they got there can tell us much more than the result itself.

4. Evaluating the specific capabilities required for the role

Up to this point, we've focused on understanding the person.

But we also need to evaluate whether they have the capabilities required for the job we're trying to fill.

This part of the interview changes depending on the position.

It makes no sense to evaluate an Engineering Manager, an Account Executive, and a Product Manager in exactly the same way.

The questions need to relate to the actual responsibilities and problems that person will face.

And here's something I consider fundamental: Before interviewing someone, we need to understand what we're looking for.

Many companies start a hiring process saying they need a Senior Engineer, a Product Manager, or an Account Executive.

But when you ask what problems they need that person to solve, the answers aren't always clear.

And if we don't know exactly what we need, how can we determine whether we've found the right person?

5. Understanding how they see themselves and how others might see them

This is one of the most interesting parts of our methodology.

We ask candidates to think about a professional situation where something didn't go as expected.

It could be a project that went wrong, a poor decision, or a disagreement with someone else.

First, we try to understand what happened and what their responsibility was.

Then we ask a different question:

"If I could interview someone else who was involved in that situation, how do you think they would describe what happened?"

This question allows us to explore something that's difficult to identify through conventional interview questions: The ability to consider other perspectives.

We want to understand whether someone can recognize that another person might have experienced the same situation differently.

And then we ask:

"If you could go back to that moment, what would you do differently?"

We're not looking for people who have never made mistakes.

We're trying to understand what they've learned from their experiences and how they apply those lessons.

6. Understanding what they actually want professionally

Someone can have all the capabilities required for a position and still not be the right person for that opportunity.

That's why we also explore their motivations.

What kind of challenges interest them?

What aspects of their work are they currently trying to improve?

What would their next role need to offer for them to genuinely consider making a move?

Because hiring isn't just about finding someone who can do the job.

We also need to understand whether they actually want to do it.

And what role does artificial intelligence play?

At Pitcheers, we use artificial intelligence to work with the information gathered during interviews, analyze candidates' experiences, and help companies evaluate them.

But there's something I consider fundamental: The quality of any evaluation depends on the quality of the information we collect.

If we ask superficial questions, we get superficial answers.

And no matter how sophisticated the AI model we use, we can't expect it to accurately evaluate something we never gathered information about.

We also need to identify what we haven't been able to validate.

For example, a candidate might say they led a project from start to finish.

But if we never asked what decisions they made, what problems they personally solved, or what their actual responsibilities were, we don't have enough evidence to understand what that leadership really involved.

And that isn't necessarily a weakness of the candidate. It might be a weakness of our interview.

The real purpose of an interview

I don't believe a good interview is one where we walk away convinced that the candidate is extraordinary.

Nor is it one where we find reasons to reject them.

I believe a good interview is one where we gather enough information to understand what someone can do, how they work, what motivates them, and what we still need to validate.

And when we don't have that information, we need to recognize it.

Because saying "I wasn't convinced" is easy.

What's difficult is explaining what we needed to know, what evidence we gathered, and what we failed to ask.

That's what we're trying to achieve with our interview methodology at Pitcheers.

A hiring process where decisions rely less on personal impressions and more on evidence from people's real professional experiences.

Because interviewing isn't about asking questions. It's about knowing how to gather the information needed to make a good hiring decision.