Preparing to interview: A mixed pool, or I'm not sure yet

The rails What you may not ask

Anything you would not ask every candidate for this role. The single most protective habit in hiring is asking identical questions in identical order.
Arrests, diagnoses, treatment, discharge type, or medical history, in any population.
Anything that probes a protected characteristic as a proxy for fit.

The rails What you may ask

Essential functions, with or without reasonable accommodation.
Job-related behavioral and situational questions, scored against anchors written before you met anyone.
Everything the work actually requires.

General information for interview preparation as of August 2026, not legal advice. Your employment counsel owns your policies.

Avoid this The mistake most employers make

Running an unstructured conversation and trusting your read of the room. That is precisely where bias operates: identical resumes draw different callbacks by name and by record, and a meta-analysis of every US field experiment since 1989 found no improvement across 25 years (Bertrand and Mullainathan, 2004; Pager, 2003; Quillian et al., 2017).

Instead What actually predicts performance

Structured interviews near the top of the corrected rankings at about .42, alongside job knowledge tests and work samples; unstructured interviews and years of experience far below (Sackett, Zhang, Berry and Lievens, 2022). Combine the scores mechanically (Kuncel et al., 2013).

Build the interview that does this

Worth knowing The evidence

If you build one instrument well, it serves every population and it is the same instrument that protects you. Start with the interview builder.

What is actually available to you

Federal Bonding: active, free, six months of coverage.
WOTC: in hiatus since December 31, 2025; keep documentation.
WorkOne and Indiana HIRE: active.

Both chairs Practice the moment

Read their chair Ninety seconds at the table “Everyone in this room knows where I am coming from. I am walking up to a stranger who holds all the cards.” Open → Practice yours What you can and cannot ask “One wrong question and I have created a lawsuit. So I ask nothing real and learn nothing real.” Open →

Reading the other chair is the fastest empathy training available, and it is free.

Before you move on: one if-then

When I sit down to run my next interview,

I will… pick one or write your own

Stays on your device. Never sent to us. See all your commitments →

Naming a specific if-then plan improves follow-through by a medium-to-large margin over holding the same goal without one (Gollwitzer and Sheeran, Implementation Intentions and Goal Achievement: A Meta-Analysis of Effects and Processes, 2006; update Sheeran, Listrom and Gollwitzer, 2024).