I beg to differ. The question is if one professional HR rep and two professional pilots can be convinced by a stranger inside of a 45-minute interaction that said stranger meets the metrics the company has put forth as the floor to be offered employment. Research on the topic (at least the small body of work that I have read) will reveal the fallacy in the idea that such selection is effective. Businesses that have the luxury often conduct multiple layered interviews for just this reason, but we just don't have the throughput (or the will) to do this. And frankly, we don't need to. We're highly-compensated blue collar labor doing work that is straightforward and frankly rarely challenging. The stakes are high and failure can be catastrophic... but that's why the machines and processes have evolved so much and removed many of the hazards resulting from human error.

Interviewers are significantly and measurably overconfident in their own judgement, and their ability to assess character from brief, personal interaction is almost nil. Human beings make unfounded judgements of a subject within the first minute or two of meeting someone, and then the next X minutes or hours subconsciously seeking out information that proves their initial (naturally biased) reaction was correct.

Delta has hired acquaintances of mine who are terrible human beings and average pilots. They've also rejected (sometimes once, sometimes twice) fantastic people who are also skilled aviators. I am not convinced that their process is any better than a well-executed hiring system based on documented experience would be. Is it effective at hiring "good interviewers"? Quite possibly.