From Max Bazerman’s “Judgement in Managerial Decision Making”
Improving Hiring Decisions (From P. 222)
- “Hiring decisions are among the most important decisions an organization can make. Virtually every corporation in the world relies on unstructured, face-to-face employment interviews as the most important tool for selecting employees who have passed through an initial screening process. The effectiveness of employment interviews for predicting future job performance has been the subject of extensive study by industrial psychologists. This research shows that job interviews do not work well. Specifically, employment interviews predict only about 14 percent of the variability in employee performance (Schmidt & Hunter, 1998). In part, this figure is so low because predicting job performance is difficult and few tools do it well. Yet some assessment tools do predict performance substantially better than the unstructured interview, and at a substantially lower cost.”
So why do people continue to believe so strongly in employment interviews?
“Managers’ robust faith in the value of interviews is the result of a “perfect storm” of cognitive biases:
- Availability: Interviewers may think they know what constitutes superior employee performance, but their information is highly imperfect. Few companies bother to collect useful data on the attributes that employees
need to succeed within specific positions or within the broader organization. As a result, managers must rely on their intuitions to determine whether or not a job candidate has the qualities needed for success. - Affect heuristic: People make very quick evaluations of whether they like others or not based on superficial features, such as physical attractiveness, mannerisms, or similarity to oneself (Ambady, Krabbenoft, & Hogan, 2006;Ambady & Rosenthal, 1993). Managers rarely revise these first impressions in the course of an employment interview (Dougherty, Turban, & Callender, 1994). Managers sometimes claim that interviews allow them to assess a potential candidate’s “fit” with the firm, but this assessment is usually not based on systematic measurement of a candidate’s qualities and is little more than the interviewer’s intuitive, affective response.
- Representativeness: Intuition also leads managers to believe that if a person can speak coherently about her goals, the organization, or the job, then she will perform well at the job. For most jobs, however, interview performance is weakly related to actual job performance. Extroverted, sociable, tall, attractive, and ingratiating people often make more positive interview impressions than others. However, these traits are often less critical to job performance than other, less immediately observable traits, such as conscientiousness and intelligence.
- Confirmation heuristic: After interviewing a number of people for a position and hiring one of them, managers only learn about the performance of the person selected. Without knowing whether that person is performing better than the rejected applicants would have, managers lack the data they would need to assess whether their selection mechanisms are effective (Einhorn & Hogarth, 1978).
What is a better alternative to face-to-face, unstructured employment interviews?
- “A number of other selection tools are available, most of which are less expensive to implement than interviews, including simple intelligence tests. But if organizations insist on conducting interviews, they ought to use structured ones in which all job candidates are reviewed by the same set of interviewers and in which each interviewer asks the same questions of each candidate (Schmidt & Hunter, 1998). In addition, interviewers’ quantitative assessments ought to be just one component fed into a linear model, along with intelligence measures, years of relevant work experience, and so on.”