In-Person Isn’t the Fix for a Broken Interview Process

Andy Burnham, the prime minister, told the podcast Jimmy’s Jobs of the Future that interviewing over video “just doesn’t seem right.” His challenge to employers: “How does a young person shine in that situation? How do you get over some of your personality, your passion?” That is a fair question aimed at the wrong target. The thing Burnham describes, an interview that rewards formula over substance, does not live in the camera. It lives in the question design. A badly designed question survives the trip from Zoom to the boardroom unscathed.

The Real Problem Predates the Screen

Burnham’s complaint, stripped down, is that video interviewing rewards formula over substance. That is worth taking seriously, but it is not a complaint about geography. A poor hiring decision, built on gut feel and an unstructured chat, is poor whether the microphone is a laptop or a lapel. Move that same interview into a boardroom and the format problem does not disappear. It just gets more expensive.

Keith Rosser, group director at employment services firm Reed and chair of the not for profit social enterprise Better Hiring Institute, gets closer to the target than Burnham does. He agrees the centuries-old hiring system poses barriers, and argues the problem runs deeper than Burnham realises: what UK hiring needs is a complete overhaul. His sharper line matters more: “The problem isn’t online interviews, the problem is that the traditional hiring process just doesn’t cut it any more.” That diagnosis indicts the interview itself, in whatever room it happens.

Structure Predicts the Hire. The Room Does Not

The People Management LinkedIn poll of 471 respondents found no consensus on what to do about this. Twenty-four per cent said employers should always interview in person, 45 per cent said video should be confined to first round, and 31 per cent said all interviews should stay on video. That three-way split is not indecision. It is a signal that practitioners are arguing about the wrong variable. If location were the actual driver of hire quality, the data would converge, not fracture almost evenly across three positions.

What we see across TA teams tells a more consistent story than that poll does: interviews without a fixed structure, without agreed evidence-based questions, without a shared scorecard, produce inconsistent and biased outcomes regardless of medium. Structure predicts whether a hiring decision holds up under scrutiny. Swap the video call for a conference room and an unstructured interview is still unstructured. You have changed the furniture, not the decision underneath.

AI-Assisted Answers Expose a Weakness the Interview Already Had

The strongest counter comes from Kerry White, director at HR consultancy and talent advisory firm RedGreen Partners: “There has been an increase in candidates using AI tools during live virtual interviews to generate or enhance answers, making it more difficult to assess their genuine knowledge and experience.” That is a legitimate concern and the best argument for the room, but it reveals something about the question, not just the tool. In our view, a question vulnerable to a fluent, AI-assisted response was already vulnerable to a fluent, generic human one. Burnham’s own complaint about formulaic answers beating passionate ones is the same defect White describes.

Move that candidate into a room and they can still recite a rehearsed answer with confidence. What stops them is not the geography. It is an interviewer who pushes past the polished opening for a specific example and follows up on what does not add up. That skill works the same across a desk as it does on a screen. Fluent, AI-shaped answers do not survive a sharp follow-up question any better in person than they do on video.

Reversing the Policy Has a Real Bill Attached

Miriam Marra, associate professor of finance and director of EDI at Henley Business School, lays out what a blanket return to in-person interviewing actually costs: less frequent interviewing and lost travel time savings that matter most to people who have been unemployed for some time and are living on strict budgets. It also closes off interviewing during a shift, or the moment someone learns they face redundancy, and easier access for candidates affected by neurodiversity conditions. She frames video as “a booster of social mobility.”

YouGov found 70 per cent of UK adults would choose a face to face interview tomorrow, against 16 per cent who would choose video, so candidate preference clearly leans toward the room. Preference is not evidence of predictive validity, and a VP of TA weighing a policy reversal has to price both sides of that ledger, not only Burnham’s.

White is right that a candidate cannot see your office culture through a screen, and that matters more for some roles and candidates than others. That is a legitimate reason to bring certain stages in person. It is not a reason to mandate it everywhere and call the problem solved.

The Question Burnham Actually Asked

Burnham wanted to know how a young person shows passion instead of formula. Rosser already answered that: the hiring process is centuries old and no longer works. The fix is a redesigned question set and an interviewer trained to probe past the rehearsed line, backed by a scorecard that weighs proof over performance. Get that right and passion has somewhere to show up, in your lobby or on your screen. Skip it and move everyone into a room instead, and you have spent real budget on travel and scheduling to arrive back at the same unstructured interview, with worse candidate access. Ask yourself which problem your policy is fixing before you rewrite it.

Original reporting: People Management.