By Craig della Penna
I haven't been hacked and I haven't gone crazy. But I want to argue something that would have offended me a few years ago: if you want the best hires, stop defaulting to in-person interviews.
I love meeting people. For the better part of a decade, interviewing meant a car or a plane and half a day in a room with a candidate — because training and experience had taught me that in-person was the only way to really know someone. The subtleties. The body language. The connection.
Then the world took the planes away, and I conducted a year of assessments over video. Here's the uncomfortable part: the hires were just as good. In some ways better. Which forced me to ask what all that travel had actually been buying — and the honest answer is that a lot of it was buying me confidence, not my clients better decisions.
1. The "subtleties" were mostly noise
What I read in a handshake, a suit, a walk across the lobby — very little of it predicted performance. The research on this is humbling: the friendly, unstructured, read-the-person interview produces what I've called the statistically proven worst results possible. The data that predicts success is what they've done, probed specifically. That transmits over video at full fidelity.
2. In-person quietly filters your pool
Every in-person round costs the candidate a cover story, a day off, sometimes a flight. The people most willing to pay that aren't necessarily your best candidates — they're your most available ones. And the best people are on the market about ten days (Workonic — as cited in my book). While you're coordinating calendars for a site visit, they're accepting someone else's offer.
3. Video gives you something in-person never did: a record
I can transcribe a video interview. My hiring teams debrief against what the candidate actually said — same day, evidence on the table — instead of against four people's competing recollections. Once you've run a debrief that way, going back to memory-based hiring feels like malpractice.
What I kept
Structure — which was never about the room. A Cipher before anyone interviews, mapped questions, independent ratings, a same-day debrief. And I still meet finalists in person when the relationship warrants it: that round is for both of us to decide, not for me to gather evidence I should already have.
The room was never the method. The method is the method.
See how my team runs interviews now →→ /product
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Frequently asked questions
Should interviews be in person or remote?
Evidence-gathering rounds work as well or better remote — bigger pool, faster process, transcribable answers. Reserve in-person for final rounds where mutual relationship-building is the actual purpose.
Do you miss important signals interviewing remotely?
You miss signals; the question is whether they were important. Handshakes and presence read as data but predict little. Specific probing of what a candidate has actually done predicts a lot, and works identically on video.
Sources
- “Top Recruitment Statistics for 2019.” Workonic — as cited in Cipher, ch. 2.
- della Penna, C. Cipher: A Proven Framework to Hire the Best People. Third Act Publishers, 2026.