From Daniel Kahnehman “Thinking, fast and slow”
If you are interviewing someone for a job, you probably will over weigh your personal impressions from the interview and under weigh the facts about the candidate. This is bad because the Halo Effect affects your thinking process.
So How Can You Conduct Better Interviews?
Focus on using factual questions and use algorithms for the interview. You should add up the scores to get a final number.
“A vast amount of research offers a promise: you are much more likely to find the best candidate if you use this procedure than if you do what people normally do in such situations, which is to go into the interview unprepared and to make choices by an overall intuitive judgment such as “I looked into his eyes and liked what I saw.” (P. 232-233)
Here is How Kahneman Suggests How You Should Interview People:
“Suppose that you need to hire a sales representative for your firm. If you are serious about hiring the best possible person for the job, this is what you should do.”
- First, select a few traits that are prerequisites for success in this position (technical proficiency, engaging personality, reliability, and so on). Don’t overdo it—six dimensions is a good number. The traits you choose should be as independent as possible from each other, and you should feel that you can assess them reliably by asking a few factual questions.
- Next, make a list of those questions for each trait and think about how you will score it, say on a 1–5 scale. You should have an idea of what you will call “very weak” or “very strong.” (p.232)
- “These preparations should take you half an hour or so, a small investment that can make a significant difference in the quality of the people you hire. To avoid halo effects, you must collect the information on one trait at a time, scoring each before you move on to the next one. Do not skip around.
- To evaluate each candidate, add up the six scores. Firmly resolve that you will hire the candidate whose final score is the highest, even if there is another one whom you like better—try to resist your wish to invent broken legs to change the ranking.
Example of How Kahneman Interviewed Army Cadets
“I made up a list of six characteristics that appeared relevant to performance in a combat unit, including “responsibility,” “sociability,” and “masculine pride.”
“I then composed, for each trait, a series of factual questions about the individual’s life before his enlistment, including the number of different jobs he had held, how regular and punctual he had been in his work or studies, the frequency of his interactions with friends, and his interest and participation in sports, among others.”
“The idea was to evaluate as objectively as possible how well the recruit had done on each dimension.” (p. 230)
Kahneman asked the interviewers to ask questions for only one trait at a time, and then give a score.
Then Kahneman added up all the scores and picked the best candidate based on the score.