A polished CV used to tell you something. Now almost anyone can produce very quickly tailored to the role they are applying for. A recent People Management piece on firms rethinking selection put it neatly: when every CV looks polished, almost everyone looks like the ideal candidate.
If you are a recruiter, you feel this daily (I do keep an eye on LinkedIn and Bluesky). If you are a hiring manager outside of HR, such as an engineering lead or a sales director reading forty applications between meetings is even harder. You cannot tell real depth from well-phrased padding, and the CV in front of you loses its weight.
So here is a question to think about.
If you could only hire from one 60-minute interview, with no CV, what would it look like?
Try answering it for a role you are hiring right now. It is harder than it sounds, because it forces you to decide what you actually need from the person.
A good proportion of multi-round processes exist because nobody made that decision. Where interviewers have not been trained on which areas their round should target, each one drifts back over the same ground: the career history, the reasons for leaving, the strengths and weaknesses. In our experience, often only 60% of an interview produces anything new. Also, I’m sure everyone here has met or knows someone who “ knew they weren’t the one after 10 minutes” interviewer (Id love to track that rejected candidate data over a 5 year period). Candidates notice the repetition, and it tells them the company has not agreed on what it is looking for, or is incapable of making a decision without others agreeing. The best candidates, who have options, are often the first to leave.
The research points the same way. Google analysed its own hiring data and, according to Laszlo Bock, its former head of people operations, found that four interviews were enough to predict a hiring decision with 86% confidence. After it adopted a rule of four, he said, time to hire fell from around six months to 45 days (Knowledge at Wharton, 2016). Academic work on selection methods, ranks structured interviews as the strongest predictor of job performance among the procedures they reviewed (Sackett et al., 2022). By ‘structured’ we mean consistent questions, scored against criteria set in advance.
One interview does not mean one gut feeling. It means a structured hour, designed in advance, where the time goes on what a CV cannot show: culture and working-style questions, pair programming for a technical hire, a role play for a sales hire. Pay is already in the advert, thanks to Pay Transparency legislation due to come in a phased basis next year. More on that here. Notice period and right to work although requirements called out in the job description are confirmed in a short admin step once you are ready to make an offer. The hour is for the only thing that matters: can this person do this job?
Hold it onsite, on a fixed date and time. Being in the room largely removes AI assistance, which is hard to rule out in remote screening and take-home tasks, so what you see is the candidate. A set slot also does a second job: people who are committed will make the journey, which tells you something about their interest and motivation before they say anything. Where a candidate needs a different arrangement, such as a remote option, treat it as a reasonable adjustment and offer it.
We think this works best for roles where the CV is already a weak signal and the person reading it is often not an expert. Two obvious type of roles are technology and sales.
Step one: let people show interest without a CV
If the CV is not the front door, what could be? Well we would replace it with a short expression of interest of three questions, plus optional evidence:
- What is something you have built (or sold) that you are proud of, and what was your part in it?
- What about this role made you apply?
- What would you want to learn in the first three months?
Candidates can answer in writing, or send a short voice or video note if they prefer. Add an optional link to anything that shows their work, such as a repository, a case study or a demo. Be honest that AI can help with these answers too. The point is not to catch anyone out. It gives the interview something specific to explore, which a generic CV does not.
Then run one interview day. Block a day in the diary, invite shortlisted candidates to book a slot, and have everyone come onsite and interview back to back. Every candidate faces the same task, the same panel and the same scorecard, and the team compares notes while the day is fresh. It is faster for candidates, fairer for everyone, and it means the hiring team commits one day rather than eight scattered hours.
Designing for neurodivergence from the start
The People Management article raised a fair concern: ambiguity about what is being assessed can be stressful for some candidates, particularly those who are neurodivergent. The answer is to remove the ambiguity, which helps every candidate not just those who need that accommodation. The following will help with this:
- Send the structure in advance. Tell candidates the format, the timings and the type of task, and what the panel is looking for.
- Share the task type early. For example, “you will review a short piece of code with us” or “you will run a discovery call with a prospect”.
- No surprise elements. No curveballs, brain teasers or “tell me about a time” questions with no preparation, it should be the same interview for each candidate.
- Score what matters. Do not score eye contact, small talk or how confident someone seems in a handshake. Score evidence against the role’s outcomes.
- Offer adjustments openly. Ask everyone, “is there anything that would help you do your best?”, such as written prompts, a quiet room, breaks or a different seating arrangement.
- Allow notes. Candidates can bring notes and use a notepad throughout.
- Keep the pace clear. A visible timetable for the hour, with the same length of slot for every candidate, believe it or not a clock on both sides of the room, one for the interviewers and one for the candidate can keep answers to questions concise and to the point.
What the 60 minutes could look like
The hour is built from the same five blocks for both roles. What changes is the task.
Technology (for example, a software engineer) — min 2 interviewers
- 5 minutes: frame the role and what success looks like at 90 days.
- 15 minutes: the candidate walks through something they built, and the panel probes for specifics: what broke, what they would change, what trade-offs they made. Real experience holds up to follow-up questions.
- 25 minutes: a live, collaborative task such as reviewing a pull request or debugging together. Decide in advance whether AI tools are allowed, and say so. If your job involves using them, consider allowing it and watching how the candidate reasons.
- 10 minutes: the candidate interviews the team, if there isn’t too many questions we recommend to ask how they feel about the 90-day goals: any concerns, and what support or development they would need.
- 5 minutes: close and next steps.
Sales (for example, an account executive) — min 2 interviewers
- 5 minutes: frame the role, the market and what success looks like at 90 days.
- 15 minutes: the candidate walks through a real deal: the numbers, the buyer, what they would do differently.
- 25 minutes: a discovery call role-play with a persona and a short brief provided in advance. Score the questions they ask, how they handle objections and how they summarise next steps, not how charming they are.
- 10 minutes: the candidate interviews the team, if there isn’t too many questions we recommend to ask how they feel about the 90-day goals: any concerns, and what support or development they would need.
- 5 minutes: close and next steps.
How to build your own 60-minute interview
You can do this for any role in six steps.
- Write down what success looks like at 90 days. Three to five concrete outcomes.
- Work backwards to what you need to see. For each outcome, ask what evidence in an interview would make you confident the person could deliver it.
- Map each piece of evidence to a block of the hour. A walkthrough of past work, a live task and a conversation about how they work. Cut anything that does not link to an outcome.
- Write the scorecard before you meet anyone. For each block, describe what a strong, acceptable and weak answer looks like. Rate against it, not against each other.
- Run it the same way for everyone. Same task, same panel, same timings. Two interviewers in the room is better than one.
- Decide quickly. Compare scorecards the same day. The delays after interviews cost you more candidates than the interview ever did.
Probation as the second half of the test
Of course in this hypothetical there is a real risk of only hiring after one hour. One hour is not enough to be certain about anyone, and a hiring decision made on a single conversation will sometimes be wrong. This is where the first three months do the work, but only if they are designed as carefully as the interview.
Our suggestion is to take the 90-day outcomes from step one and publish them in the job advertisement as the probation goals. Candidates can then see exactly what the bar is before they apply, and the manager and the new hire agree what “good” means from day one. It also makes pass and fail decisions fairer and easier to defend.
We hear the same thing from hiring managers: problems that show up early are left to settle without intervention. Generally because these performance conversations feel awkward for managers, maybe there is hope that things will improve, and the then the months begin to pass. In Ireland, probation is generally capped at six months for most employees, extendable only on an exceptional basis and never beyond 12 months (Philip Lee LLP, 2023), and an employee generally gains the right to bring an unfair dismissal claim after 12 months of continuous service (Pinsent Masons, 2021). An issue ignored through probation is therefore much harder to deal with afterwards. Agreed goals fix that. They tell the employee from day one what is expected, and they give the manager specific deliverables to point to at each review, so the conversation is about the work rather than a feeling.
Put it in the interview too. Share the 90-day goals with the candidate and ask directly: how do you feel about these, what concerns do you have, and what support or development would you need to reach them? A candidate who has talked the goals through before starting begins with a shared picture of the job, and one who is uneasy tells you something worth knowing before an offer is made.
Illustrative examples (adapt to your own role and context):
Technology
- By day 30: onboarded, set up and has shipped a first small change to production.
- By day 60: owns a defined piece of work end to end and reviews others’ code.
- By day 90: has delivered a scoped project to agreed quality and can explain the decisions behind it.
Sales
- By day 30: product and market training complete, has shadowed customer calls and run their own first discovery calls.
- By day 60: has built a pipeline of qualified opportunities to an agreed target.
- By day 90: has progressed opportunities to the later stages and closed an agreed number of deals, or met an agreed ramp target.
The goals have to be within the person’s control and supported by proper onboarding. They should be reviewed at fixed points, with honest feedback along the way and no surprises at the end. And because probation periods and dismissal rights differ between Ireland and the UK, check the rules with your legal advisers before you build this into contracts.
Where this does not work
Not every role suits this approach. High-volume hiring with hundreds of applicants cannot practically run a live hour for each, and some senior roles depend on track record and references that carry real information. A single interview also puts more weight on the quality of your interviewers, which is why the scorecard and the second pair of eyes matter.
The CV does not disappear completely either. You still need to verify employment, qualifications and references. What changes is that it stops doing the filtering.
What a recruiter adds
When the CV stops doing the filtering, the work moves to the things a good recruiter does anyway: defining the outcomes with the hiring manager, designing the scorecard and the task, running the interview day, verifying the claims that matter, and making sure every candidate has a fair shot at showing what they can do.
If you decide to try it please let me know, I would be generally interested to support or find out the results.
References
- Clemo, F. (2026). Could a game help find your next hire? People Management, 14 August 2026.
- Knowledge at Wharton (2016). Open Sourcing Google’s HR Secrets. 26 February 2016.
- Philip Lee LLP (2023). The European Union (Transparent and Predictable Working Conditions) Regulations 2022. 20 February 2023.
- Pinsent Masons (2021). EU reforms require attention of employers in Ireland. Out-Law Analysis, 23 September 2021.
- Sackett, P. R., Zhang, C., Berry, C. M. and Lievens, F. (2022). Revisiting meta-analytic estimates of validity in personnel selection. Journal of Applied Psychology, 107(11), 2040–2068.
Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash
