There’s a nice article here on interviewing, it’s short and sweet, but pretty much sums up my views on the matter entirely. The TLDR of it is, you’re wasting your time with interviews unless they are structured, consistent across all candidates, and aimed specifically at assessing skills you know are required for the job. If you do all of that, then you’ve slightly decreased the chance you’re going to fuck up, but only slightly. Which means you’re probably better off not interviewing people at all, and just testing for intelligence and skills.
Oh yeah, and there’s no point in doing references either. I’ve yet to see a single study which pegs their reliability at over 20%, which means they’re only predictive of job performance 20% of the time. The other 80% of the time they have either no predictive power, or are telling you the opposite of what’s going to happen. But recruiters and hiring managers and HR departments keep using antiquated bullshit ineffective methods for hiring people because… Well because they usually don’t know any better, don’t want to know any better, and even if they do know better, their boss would fire them for not using those techniques because s/he doesn’t know any better.