Not sure what you mean by 'sim interview' but I had to fly a 727 sim as part of my 2 day interview process at Delta in 1985. It was only about 15 minutes worth of flying, just a couple patterns at 3000' vectors to an ILS, one to a go around, the next to a landing.

I think everyone interviewing at that time had to, but later as the Sims got full of new hires in training, they cut back to just requiring the 'civilian only' pilots to fly the sim at their interviews.

When it was over I asked my sim IP what that was all about. He said it was to be sure you could do what your logbook said you could do. He said, "If some guy comes in here and says he's a 727 Captain, I might fail an engine on him just to see what he does. He should be able to handle that. If he can't, well... either he's not really a 727 Captain or he's just bad.".

I had no 727 time so he didn't fail an engine on me! I did have KC135 time though, but he said I did fine in the 727.

The general idea at the time was that Delta could verify the military guy's flying time and history through their military records, but not so much with the civilian guys, so they wanted to be sure they could fly.

A month later, when I was going through 727 sim training on the engineer panel, they brought in a guy to fly in the left seat while I was working the panel. The guy comes in wearing a black satin type jacket with a big silver "Citation III" on the back! (insert my huge eye roll here!).

Turns out he needed some extra time in the seat to remember how to fly I guess, because he nearly made me airsick just trying to hold 3000' on downwind!