From Chip Heath’s “Decisive”
Is Giving Interviews for Job Applicants a Waste of Time?
“Research has found that interviews are less predictive of job performance than work samples, job-knowledge tests, and peer ratings of past job performance. Even a simple intelligence test is substantially more predictive than an interview.” (L2253)
Example of the Author Conducting an Interview:
“In the spring of 1999, Dan Heath interviewed a guy named Rob Crum, who was applying for a job as a graphic designer at Thinkwell, the textbook-publishing firm Dan cofounded. Here’s how he remembers the interview process”:
- “Crum was a young man with close-cropped hair, glasses, and clothes that were awfully hip for an interview. He had earrings and a big nose ring that was shaped roughly like the ones you see on bulls. During the interview, he answered questions haltingly, as if deciding how much he should share, and some of his comments seemed a little sarcastic. I didn’t click with him.”
- After the interviews, Dan and his partner gave each applicant a timed test. This test would simulate the kind of work they would do for the company.
To avoid Biases, the tests did not have applicants name.
When Dan and his partner reviewed all the test scores, it turned out Rob Crum had the highest score! Even though Rob scored the highest, Dan still didn’t want to hire him due to his bad impression of him from the interview.
“We debated for a long time whether to hire Rob. I was skeptical; he didn’t seem like he was a “culture fit.” (Wasn’t that crucial?) My first impression had not been very positive. (Aren’t you supposed to trust your instincts?) In the end, though, I agreed to trust the sample and hire him.”
- Rob turned out to be one of their best employees and even became a close friend of Dan. “Most embarrassing for me, my first impressions of him had been dead wrong. Ridiculously wrong.”
“I cringe at how much I struggled with the decision to hire Rob and how much weight I gave to my own flawed first impressions. In retrospect, I wonder why I bothered to interview him at all.”
“I was trying to size him up—to peer into his soul and assess him as a potential colleague. I was trying to predict how good an employee he’d be. But I didn’t need to predict that! The work sample told me everything I needed to know.”
Why Do We Believe in Interviews So Much?
“With so little proof that interviews work, why do we rely on them so much? Because we all think we’re good at interviewing. We are Barbara Walters or Mike Wallace. We leave the interview confident that we’ve taken the measure of the person.
The psychologist Richard Nisbett calls this the “interview illusion”: our certainty that we’re learning more in an interview than we really are. He points out that, in grad-school admissions, interviews are often taken as seriously as GPA. The absurdity, he says, is that “you and I, looking at a folder or interviewing someone for a half hour, are supposed to be able to form a better impression than one based on three-and-a-half years of the cumulative evaluation of 20 to 40 different professors.”
What Are Some Better Ways to Hire People?
- “Sometimes we think we’re gathering information when we’re actually fishing for support.”
“Take the tradition of calling people’s references when you want to hire them. It’s an exercise in self-justification: We believe someone is worth hiring, and as a final “check” on ourselves, we decide to gather more information about them from past colleagues. So far, so good. Then we allow the candidate to tell us whom we should call, and we dutifully interview those people, who say glowing things about the candidate, and then, absurdly, we feel more confident in our decision to hire the person. (Imagine if we bought a time-share because the salesman had three awesome references.)”
- “In some organizations, hiring managers have become smarter about reference calls. “
“Some ask the references for additional people to contact who weren’t on the original list. Those secondary interviews will tend to yield more neutral information. Other people have reconsidered the kinds of questions they ask in reference calls. Rather than ask for an evaluation of the candidate (“Would you say Steve’s performance was closer to ‘stunning’ or ‘breathtaking’? Be honest.”), many firms now seek specific factual information.
For example, Ray Rothrock, a venture capitalist with Venrock, says that one of the best diagnostic questions he’s discovered in assessing entrepreneurs is “How many secretaries has this entrepreneur had in the past few years?” If the answer is five, chances are you’ve got someone with some issues.”
- Give applicants a trial test or trial run.
“Often our best interviewees turn out to be our worst performers,” said Steve Cole of HopeLab.
“In response, HopeLab has begun to give potential employees a three-week consulting contract. Cole said, “It’s unbelievably effective. No more fear. How are we going to make our hiring decisions? We make our decisions based on the empirical performance of the employee in our community, on the kinds of jobs that we do. The job market totally prevents you from getting this kind of useful information. So collect your own personal performance data in your own personal context. In some ways it really doesn’t matter how well they did in their last job.” - “We’ve seen three strategies for doing that. First, we’ve got to be diligent about the way we collect information, asking disconfirming questions and considering the opposite. Second, we’ve got to go looking for the right kinds of information: zooming out to find base rates, which summarize the experiences of others, and zooming in to get a more nuanced impression of reality. And finally, the ultimate reality-testing is to ooch: to take our options for a spin before we commit.”