Imagine for a second that you have put in all of the effort to position yourself to ask someone out on a date. They say yes, excitedly and you set a time to meet one on one to learn more about one another.

Now imagine that the asking party during this date decides to kick the front door down and just start asking a series of questions.

“What made you want to go out with me?”

“What are your expectations tonight?”

“What can you tell me about your last relationship?”

“Are we paying together or splitting the bill?”

We’re now 15 minutes into the date and one side is getting the information that they may be looking for, but the other side is probably sweating and uncomfortable being grilled about everything that doesn’t matter in that moment, especially for a first date.

Why is that my example? Because it’s exactly how we treat interviews in the professional setting. A one-sided affair where one side (the company) invites someone for an interview and does not do anything except want to check the boxes they have to determine professional viability.

Among the reasons that most “recruiters” are awful at their jobs is because they don’t know how to have a conversation. Whether it’s a date or an interview for a job, the goal should be to get to know one another and that isn’t done through a sequence of questions on a list, it’s done by just talking to one another.

I may have some things that I would like to know about whoever I am talking to, but I never go into any situation with a bullet point list of questions. It feels robotic and it is the complete antithesis of what human interaction should be.

The scripted nature of a job interview gets scripted answers. Those are easy to ask, easy to answer and very easy to discern what they are. They also do a terrible job of helping you learn about someone.

In an ideal situation, a conversation is relaxed, it’s casual and it has people exchanging information that is useful and engaging. If we can do that in a non-professional setting, what can’t we take that same mindset into the workplace?

A more conversational two-way interview format has benefits. Open-ended questions allow candidates to showcase soft skills. Rigid questionnaires stifle authentic interaction. Throughout the process, transparency and mutual evaluation should be integrated, not tacked on at the end.

When I kiss my wife goodnight, besides being happy that we’re together, I am just as happy that I don’t ever have to date again because it looks absolutely miserable. Now with job hunting, I imagine that I will have to do that again at some point but after my last experience and searching for almost six months, I don’t want to do that either because of how equally painful that process was as well.

It should be mutual when meeting people, because you don’t want to just determine viability, you want to determine compatibility. As an interviewer I want to be just as open and transparent because I want any candidate to make an informed decision about their next steps. There are so many things that can be learned in an interview setting, from what you may be looking for, to what you might need all the way to what you didn’t even know existed.

All information is good information, but to extract the right information, you need to be willing and able to go beyond what you just want and create a situation where you can get what you need.