If I weeded people out based on their talking too much in Zoom meetings, I would lose a fair number of my best people. I don't think this would make it into the top 20 red flags to look for in an interview.
To me, one of the most reliable ways to blow your interview is to just keep talking and talking, never providing any sort of re-entry window into the conversation for your interviewer. Double-bad if you are not actually answering the question, and just spouting your prepared speech. This happens so often that I think it must be something these unfortunate candidates are learning somewhere.
Zoom makes this even worse than in person, as the software often won't even let you insert yourself into someone else's stream-of-consciousness word salad to help them course-correct.
I would love it if interviews were structured in a way like it’s an actual conversation.
Unfortunately a lot of companies treat them like a pop quiz, ask everyone the same 10 questions, which are mapped to 10 selection criteria and evaluate their 10 mostly prepared responses.
Good interviewers will have a bunch of questions as prompts, but generally ask a lot of follow-ups.
I blame the STAR method mostly, the concept that you have instant recall of past experiences in a high pressure situation, indexed by the questions the company is going to ask, is absolutely crazy. I wonder if there’s been any research into “tell me about a conflict and how you resolved it” type behavioural questions and whether they are effective. Even the most dramatic of employee knows how to tone it down, rewrite/make up scenarios to pass these types of questions.
