The half-hour interview that costs years

Google’s people analytics team looked back at its hiring data and found interviewer scores converged after about four conversations. The fifth onwards added very little, and the famous brainteasers predicted nothing at all. They published it and cut their own process. A half-hour interview is a long time to spend on a signal that turns out not to be one.

Reading hiring books gives you vocabulary. Sitting through fifty interviews gives you the pattern recognition. The dataset I trust most about hiring is the one I built by being in the room -- watching which ”great on paper” candidates fell apart on the first specific follow-up.

Hastings’s discipline was simple: would you fight to keep this person if they tried to leave? If not, they should not be in the role. Netflix bakes that question into the interview itself -- and the half-hour conversation is structured to surface whether the answer is genuinely yes.

You can technically let someone go. The cost -- to the team, to the work, to your own time -- is real. The habit I am building is to slow down for that one decision in a way I would not for almost any other call on a Tuesday.

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