How to make interviews less boring and generic (and maybe value-add)

I wanted to write something about interview techniques. I realize if anyone ever comes across this post via a Google search, you probably want to know interview techniques as the person being interviewed. But I actually think we can improve interview techniques on both sides: interviewer and interviewee. (Is that a word? I think so.) How can we do this? We can start by making interviews less generic.

Interview Techniques: Some background

There is almost nothing more generic in the world than a standard job interview. I have approximately 613,384 stories about this. I will not bore you with them. This is only logical, though: most conversation is small talk. Job interviews can be fairly uncomfortable deals for both sides. When we’re uncomfortable, what happens? We resort more and more to small talk. It all makes sense.

Think about the most common interview questions. Almost all of them are horribly generic. (“Walk me through your resume.”) If they’re not insanely generic, they’re questions that are easy to game. (“Tell me your biggest weakness, sir.”) CEOs yelp and screech about “the war for talent,” but in reality their hiring process is broken and their recruiting process is alienating the best candidates.