esidency and fellowship candidates are applying to more programs to enhance their chances of securing interviews and matching favorably. The COVID-19 pandemic has shifted interviews to video formats, which lowers interviewassociated costs for applicants but may further increase application numbers. 1 While a candidate's application to a training program communicates some interest in the program, the relative amount of interest is obscured when candidates apply to large numbers of programs. We suspect that, as a result, programs host large numbers of low-yield interviews.The number of interviews is steadily increasing, and there is widespread agreement on the need to ease congestion in the pre-Match evaluation process. 2 Proposals to reduce this burden include signaling (organized, centrally-controlled protocol for limited communication of interest), [3][4][5] capping the number of applications or the number of interviews, 6,7 and an early acceptance matching program as in college admissions. 8,9 We propose another solution, an ''interview match'' to address the expanding number of interviews. 10 An interview match enables candidates and programs to express preferences privately by ranking their interview choices individually or in tiers. This may ease congestion in the ''marketplace,'' reduce costs for candidates, favor interviews that are more likely to lead to a match in the final Match, and avoid interviews unlikely to convert to a match. An interview match algorithm would match based on the same ''deferred-acceptance'' algorithm currently used by the National Resident Matching Program but adapted to a ''many-to-many'' setting where candidates and programs receive multiple interviews. 11,12 In brief, the algorithm assigns candidates to their top preference interview positions, and the programs temporarily retain those assigned candidates who coincide with their preferred (top) candidates, while rejecting those candidates who exceed the program's interview capacity. The ''rejected'' interview match candidates are then assigned to their next most preferred program on their interview match ranking lists, and so on.In this Perspective, we present 2 simplified scenarios to illustrate the potential to minimize low-yield interviews and some of the challenges to be considered when implementing an interview match. We then briefly discuss the advantages of an interview match over other proposals.
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