Why traditional job interviews won't find you the best employees — and a new interview structure to use instead (via farnamstreet)
. In a study entitled "Belief in the Unstructured Interview: The Persistence of an Illusion," participants predicted the future GPA of a set of students. They either received biographical information about the students or both biographical information and an interview. In some of the cases, the interview responses were entirely random, meaning they shouldn't have conveyed any genuine useful information.
Studying the efficacy of interviews is complicated and hard to manage from an ethical standpoint. We can't exactly give different people the same real-world job in the same conditions. We can take clues from fortuitous occurrences, like the University of Texas Medical School change in class size and the subsequent lessons learned. Without the legal change, the interviewers would never have known that the students they rejected were of equal competence to the ones they accepted.
Kahneman introduced a new interviewing style in which candidates answered a predefined series of questions that were intended to measure relevant personality traits for the role . He then asked interviewers to give candidates a score for how well they seemed to exhibit each trait based on their responses. Kahneman explained that "by focusing on standardized, factual questions I hoped to combat the halo effect, where favorable first impressions influence later judgments.
Why does it help if everyone hears the same questions? Because, as we learned previously, interviewers can make unconscious judgments about candidates, then ask questions intended to confirm their assumptions. Structured interviews help measure competency, not irrelevant factors. Ron Friedman explains this further:
"Another step to help minimize your interviewing blind spots: Include multiple interviewers and give them each specific criteria upon which to evaluate the candidate. Without a predefined framework for evaluating applicants — which may include relevant experience, communication skills, attention to detail — it's hard for interviewers to know where to focus. And when this happens, fuzzy interpersonal factors hold greater weight, biasing assessments.
," "The science of personnel selection is over a hundred years old yet decision-makers still tend to play it by ear or believe in tools that have little academic rigor ... An important reason why talent isn't measured more scientifically is the belief that rigorous tests are difficult and time-consuming to administer, and that subjective evaluations seem to do the job 'just fine.
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