Fixing the Interviewing Chaos: The 3 Biggest Challenges (and How to Solve Them)

Why interviewing feels so much harder than it should

You’ve got good people. You’ve got a process on paper. And yet, interviews still fall apart. Hiring managers give mixed feedback, candidates drop out of the process and HR struggle to pinpoint how and what to improve.

Even small issues can compound quickly, collectively slowing hiring, frustrating your teams, and eroding candidate confidence. Most of this chaos comes down to three core issues that undermine even the most well-intentioned hiring processes: lack of structure, lack of visibility, and lack of accountability.

Let’s unpack each one and explore how to fix them.

1. Everyone’s winging It 

When every interviewer has their own approach, consistency goes out the window. You see it in how questions change from one candidate to the next, how scoring feels arbitrary, and how “fit” really means “someone I liked.” Without a shared guide and score guide, interviewers improvise, and candidates notice.

The impact:

• Inconsistent, subjective evaluations
• Unfair decisions and missed talent
• Damage to candidate trust and employer brand

The fix:

Create shared templates and role-specific interview guides aligned to key competencies and behaviors. Standardize scoring so every interviewer speaks the same language of “what good looks like,” and everyone assesses fairly and consistently every time.

2. You can’t see what’s happening

You can’t fix what you can’t see, and for many TA leaders, the interview stage is a black box. You don’t know whether interviewers are following the guide, which ones consistently give late feedback, or where candidates are getting stuck. That lack of visibility leaves you reacting to problems after the fact instead of improving the process in real time.

The impact:

• Coaching opportunities are missed
• Interviewer behavior goes unchecked
• Decision-making lacks data and transparency

The fix:

Make interview quality measurable. Track adherence to best practices like guide usage, scoring completeness, and speaking balance. Use real-time analytics to spot trends and uncover what drives great hires.

3. No one’s truly accountable

Recruiters coordinate, interviewers assess, hiring managers decide, but when something goes wrong, no one owns the outcome. That lack of accountability breeds confusion, delays, and decision paralysis.

The impact:

• Slower time-to-hire
• Candidate drop-offs
• A reactive, not strategic, approach to interviewing 

The fix:

Make interview ownership part of your TA strategy. Clearly define who drives each stage of the process, and empower stakeholders with training, insights, and coaching based on what is really going on in interviews that analytics can highlight.

Building better interviews can be simple

You don’t need to overhaul your entire talent acquisition strategy to see the impact. Fixing even one of these three foundational challenges - structure, visibility, or accountability can unlock immediate improvements in how your teams’ interview.

Learn more about how Smart Interview Professional can help those pieces click into place, speeding up hiring, improving confidence with informed decision making, and transforming candidate experiences.