These days, mining for top talent happens not just through a traditional face-to-face interview, but through an expansive process that includes assessments, simulations, social meetings and other experiential phases. Advancements in technology have made the interviewing process even more capacious: video, recorded audio and social media have all gravitated to recruiters’ fingertips.

This begs the question: Is the face-to-face job interview still a valuable part of the recruitment process?

Michael Patak, president and CEO of Patak Trading Partners LLC, a boutique proprietary trading group and member firm of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, doesn’t find much worth in the traditional face-to-face job interview. He said having potential traders sit across from him at a table and speak of their ability to facilitate a futures trade doesn’t do much for his ability to discern who would or wouldn’t be a good fit for the firm.

“It’s the performance that dictates if you’re getting hired or not,” Patak said. “Don’t tell me you can trade. Show me you can trade.”

Patak has candidates do just that. A few years ago he created TopstepTrader, a division of his trading group designed as a scouting agency that puts potential traders through simulated trials to gauge their ability.

Dubbed the “Combine,” in reference to the NFL’s player scouting combine it holds prior to its collegiate drafts, the simulation puts would-be traders through two- or four-week programs that simulate real financial market conditions. Traders in the simulation are provided with approximately $50,000 of fake capital to trade on.

The best traders who complete the “Combine” are given real capital to come on-board and trade for the firm.

“[It] gives us a clear way to mine for trading talent,” Patak said. “We call it mining because the failure rate is 95 percent, so we’re looking for that 5 percent. We’re looking for that rookie … that diamond and we polish them up and we are developing and discovering.”

Face-to-face job interviews can be helpful in choosing the right candidates, but this method isn’t quite as valuable as it used to be, according to George Bradt, founder and managing partner of PrimeGenesis, an executive on-boarding firm.