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There is only one answer here: Your company is absolutely unprofessional. I have to travel to your place, possibly wait some time, go through an interview, travel back home, and all that time you already know that I have no chance in hell to get a job.

The behaviour of your company is utterly disgusting.

You say "I’m NOT asking suggestions on how to avoid useless interviews (they will always exist)." Not at any decent place run by honest people. I'll just repeat this: What your company does is disgusting.

The best that you can do is to call the candidate, tell them that there is a problem (there is no budget, position already filled, position not available anymore) which makes it extremely unlikely they would be offered a job, and that you would be fully understanding if they didn't come to the interview.

If you have to interview these candidates, you should treat them just like any other person you are interviewing. Conduct the interview thoroughly, politely, and respectfully.

Remember, be respectful of the candidates time just as they should be of yours. Who knows, these candidates might surprise you.

Cancel the interview.

It is the only honest option. The candidate doesn't come for a pleasant chat, he comes with the purpose of getting the job. If he has a small chance, give him that small chance because he might surprise you.

But from your description he has no chance at all. No matter what he does, no matter if he turns out to be the perfect candidate - he won't get the job.

So you are just wasting your and his time, all the while pretending that he could get the job. That is both disrespectful and dishonest and I would refuse to behave like that in your position.

Cancel the interview and spare him the travel time and expenses as well as the wasted interview time. If your HR has a problem with that, ask them how they justify wasting company time like that.

Note that it is well possible that nobody has malicious intent in this. Maybe the processes in HR are just so that interview invitations are done all at once at the beginning and there is no feedback loop to the hiring decision. That doesn't mean you should feel forced to lie and swindle a person.

Don't forget that how a company interviews its candidates is part of the company's reputation.

So if the word spreads (in Glassdoor for example) that candidates are not well received, interviews are rushed and people come for already filled positions and lose time for nothing, it could impact the company's future reputation, and prevent good candidates for coming.

Just do a good interview like you would for any other wanted candidate. And don't send one of your teammates last minute to replace you on a situation you decided.

How much time do you have between realizing the interview is useless and the time scheduled for the interview?

If there is no reasonable time to pull back, go meet the candidate, apologise for the interview being cancelled in last second, be kind and respectful. Then go to the one who caused it and ask them to inform you earlier.

If there is time to pull back, go call the candidate, apologise for the interview being cancelled and move on.

There is nothing that can feed me up more than realizing all the effort I commited to something was, from the beginning, a completely useless waste of energy and time. What they want you to do is actually something like this*.

When I decided I would accept the offer from my recent employer the second call was to the company I was about to visit for the second interview to cancel it. It is waste of your time and mocking of the candidate.

• I was looking for the sketch with Colin Chapman and John Cleese starring.

Conduct the interview professionally and provide feedback to your manager and those setting up the interviews. The first issue is that they continue to happen with frequency. Until someone understands things like a lean talent pool is not assisted by wasting the time of the existing talent, this issue will persist.

To the interview itself, I agree with the others, conduct it professionally. Your time is largely already sucked up in the little details outside of the interview from details like not being able to start into the next step of your work because you have to get up in 10 minutes to just walking there and back. You probably have 45 minutes sunk in your day regardless of the interview length.

should interviews last the usual 45-60 minutes? Should I cut them as soon as possible?

Most any meeting should be guided primarily based on content. Time is more an upper limit than a lower. To sit uncomfortably for 40 extra minutes is trading one sad situation (that was a waste of time to come in) for another (that was a waste of time to sit through). Sure, if you're confirmed in two minutes, perhaps you can explore a bit about what led them to apply or things that both give them a sense of shooting for what they should not and you a sense of what to take back to the people causing your waste of time. But overall, artificial inflation serves little purpose.

Should interviews be similar in content as standard?

I really hope not. Don't get me wrong, having standard questions is not at all bad. But trying to cookie-cutter a process into a human conversation can really tie your hands. Take the questions where the conversation goes. Use the standard points as a framework. But once you confirm your suspicions, the only reason I can think of to insist on wasting everyone's time with questions that won't apply is leviathan companies more interested in not getting sued than finding quality fits.

Should I send one of my team members maybe less busy than me (even if
they may not have any experience as an interviewer)?

Like others said, you're still a reflection of your company. Perhaps bring another along to at least help that person get the experience. Down the road, it could be appropriate to hand off some of these interviews to someone now also qualified, but overall be wary of the message you'd be sending by handing these off. "I'd do this, but I'm far more valuable than you. So you do it." Even if it's true, it doesn't sit well.

Pivot.

Change your stance and the reason why you are interviewing.

Depending on the industry, strong employees are a rare commodity. Even if the current position disappeared, they may be a strong asset to your company in some other role. It sounds like you have many positions that become available, so it doesn't seem unlikely that another appropriate position will open up in the near future.

Perform your interview thoroughly and remember the candidate for later, or hire them for future positions. Hiring only when you need someone will put your company at a disadvantage by limiting your options to whoever happens to be available at the time that you look!

Also consider:

• In some countries, you typically don't interview for a position to begin with. You enter a company and then they decide how to best utilize your abilities.




• Companies like Google don't hire you for anything specific. If I recall correctly, when my friend interviewed, neither the team, nor the country were even determined. That shows how much Google believes in their policy of grabbing every talented engineer they can.




• Overpaying a strong employee to do simple stuff for a few months because you hired her too early is still probably preferable/advantageous over delaying a project because you don't have the skills you need, or starting the project with a much weaker candidate because they are the only one that was on the market at the time.




• An under-qualified candidate may still be appropriate for another position.