Your 4:30pm interview should not count for less. But does it?
After a day of interviews, every judgement becomes more vulnerable to noise. Not because recruiters do not care, but because attention is finite. Design a process where timing matters less than behaviour.
A candidate tells the exact same story at 9:30am and at 4:30pm.
The judgement can still be different.
Not necessarily because the candidate changed. Because the interviewer did.
An interview is cognitive work too
A good interview asks a lot at once: listening, probing, remembering nuance, taking notes, interpreting behaviour and then explaining a decision. Do it six times in a row and the context changes. Attention is not an unlimited battery.
Back in 1993, Willihnganz and Meyers examined how time of day related to performance in a selection interview. Their point was not that every afternoon interview is unreliable. It was that timing and mental state are factors you cannot simply pretend are outside the hiring process. Related research in other high-stakes professional decisions suggests that sequence, fatigue and available mental energy can affect how strict or intuitive people become.
How much does your score say about the candidate, and how much does it say about the moment you saw them?
The quiet influence of interview number six
Five interviews done. The calendar ran late. Candidate six walks in. You are still professional, but you may have less patience for a pause. A long answer may feel vague more quickly. That is not a character flaw. It is a process risk.
Make the judgement less dependent on the hour
Leave space between interviews. Use agreed scoring criteria. Capture observations immediately. And look for patterns rather than one moment: combine the conversation with job-relevant exercises and behavioural signals where appropriate.
See behaviour, not only what you remember
At Assess4me, game-based assessments add another structured source of observation. Not to label someone automatically as good or bad, but to observe how someone makes choices, approaches problems, responds to feedback or adapts when a situation changes.
That does not produce a final answer. It produces better hypotheses and better questions in the interview. The fairest hiring process is not the one where everyone gets the exact same time slot. It is the one where the time slot has as little influence as possible on what someone seems worth.
Sources: Willihnganz, M. A., & Meyers, L. S. (1993). Effects of Time of Day on Interview Performance. Public Personnel Management, 22(4). Danziger, S., Levav, J., & Avnaim-Pesso, L. (2011). Extraneous factors in judicial decisions. PNAS, 108(17), 6889-6892.