Why Job Interviews Are a Waste of Time

A wealth of research points to the futility of interviews for hiring.

Research has found that interviews are less predictive of job performance than other tools. In fact, as we saw in the last part of this article, a simple intelligence test is far better in predicting the candidates who will perform better in their careers. The marks managers give to job candidates have no correlation with anything useful. Psychologists who study interviews recommend that you are better off discarding those scores. According to them, if there is a contest between what your gut feeling tells you about a candidate and their scores on a simple intelligence test, you should trust the test scores.

Read on to find out why this is so and why we still persist with this absolute mockery.

Interviews assume that performance on an interview is correlated with performance on the job and that they can reliably know a person from an interview. This is far from true.

What happens if we compare the performance of people who were rejected by formal interview processes with those who were selected? Fortunately, this experiment happened naturally in a medical college in Texas, whose administration admitted 50 of the lowest-scoring interviewees out of the 800 applicants, along with 150 top scorers, as they could not fill in the 50 vacancies with top-ranked applicants. However, no one in the medical college knew about the low-ranked interviewees. Both groups passed out with the same level of honors and one year into their residency, both groups performed equally well.

Professor Allen Huffcut likens unstructured interviews to dating, where first impressions, which are often wrong, rule the roost. Psychologists Tara MacDonald and Mike Ross found that young people in dating dismiss objective data when the information doesn’t fit what they want to see. Their study found that judgments about the longevity of their relationships by dating couples were far removed from reality. Compared to them, their roommates and parents predicted this much better. The couples, even when they were aware of the problems in their relationship, ignored it.

Professor Huffcut says studies show interviewing managers behave similarly. Blinded by optimism, these managers ignore highly relevant information and give importance to irrelevant factors when hiring.

Our intuition fails us because while the interview reveals the candidate's present intentions, it does not reveal the candidate's behavior. Social psychologist David G. Myers says the best predictor of a person’s future behavior is their past behavior, not intentions.

Then, there is the fundamental attribution error- our tendency to underestimate the influence of circumstances on our behavior. We like to think that our behavior will be guided by some internal dispositions, whether we are in the office, playing with friends, attending interviews, or attending parties. However, as we know very well, we act differently in each of the cases, depending on the situation.

To complicate matters, judgments can be affected by appearances. In a classic psychological experiment, men ‘interviewed’ two women over the phone and then made their judgments. The men were shown photographs of the two women, one attractive and the other not so much. In reality, the photos were not real and did not belong to the women interviewed. However, the men who thought they were interacting with an attractive woman rated her higher compared to the other men who were interacting with a less attractive woman.

When the recordings of the calls were played to independent men who knew nothing about the photos and the previous ratings, they, too, agreed with the judgment of the previous lot of men. They rated the woman (who was rated high by the first lot of men) as more likable, friendly, and sociable without even seeing the photos!

How is this possible? According to social psychologist Ron Friedman, the only possible answer is that the independent reviewers were picking on the vibes being sent out by the interviewers when they thought they were talking to an attractive woman, which elicited similarly friendly vibes from the woman. The men behaved with considerable warmth and thereby brought out the best positive behavior from the interviewee. The first impression had created a self-fulfilling prophecy.

According to organizational psychologist Jeffrey Pfeffer, research shows that when people believe they are interacting with a qualified, intelligent individual, they interact in a way that gives enough opportunities for the candidate to demonstrate their competence. This tends to reinforce the initial impressions of competence and reputation. This can work the other way around, too, when interviewers initially believe the candidate is unworthy and, thereafter, go on to ask questions to prove their belief.

Preconceived notions and biases can also interfere with judgments. A classic experiment at Princeton University found that when white males interviewed black applicants, the interviewers sat farther away and ended the interview 25 percent earlier than when the applicant was white. The interviewer’s behavior elicited a correspondingly inferior behavior from the applicants, who were seen as nervous and less effective and also revealed to the experimenters that they felt more nervous and less effective.

Friedman says that the first piece of data we learn about an individual holds a disproportionally large influence on the way we interpret information revealed later on, despite the fact that it is not necessarily more representative, an effect the Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman referred to as the anchoring effect.

The halo effect occurs when a single positive characteristic (such as a firm handshake or good looks) affects our judgment about other unrelated traits, such as the abilities required for a particular job. This is pervasive in job interviews. Research shows that good-looking people are perceived as more competent and are more likely to be hired and promoted. The same goes for height, too. Studies show that taller people earn more on average.

Then there is our susceptibility to favor people who are like ourselves and who have commonalities. The commonalities could be a shared native place, native tongue, or the same alma mater, but trivial commonalities, such as names starting with the same letter, can also fool people into this trap. When we recruit people who are like us, all we will have done is replace the old-boy network, where you hired your nephew, with the new-boy network, where you hire whoever impressed you most when you shook his hand, as Malcolm Gladwell laments.

Friedman also shows that the order in which candidates are interviewed has a bearing on the outcome. If the candidates interviewed first are rated high on several parameters, the candidates appearing later on are likely to be rated lower, irrespective of their actual performance. This is because we would like to appear balanced in our evaluations.

If interviewing doesn’t work, why are we fascinated with interviewing? Because everyone thinks they are good at interviewing. People think they are able to evaluate a person’s worth in a 20-minute interaction. The psychologist Richard Nisbett calls this the “interview illusion”, our delusional belief that interviews produce knowledge about the person being interviewed.

Social psychologist David G. Myers lists some spectacular interview outcomes:

‘‘You’d better learn secretarial skills or else get married.’’ —Modeling agency, rejecting Marilyn Monroe in 1944

‘‘You ought to go back to driving a truck.’’ —Concert manager, firing Elvis Presley in 1954

‘‘Can’t act. Can’t sing. Slightly bald. Can dance a little.’’

—A film company’s verdict on Fred Astaire’s 1928 screen test

Then, there is the rampant lying during interviews.

At least one study found that job seekers lie more than 80% of the time during interviews! The fun part, however, is that we all believe that we can catch lying. Nothing is farther from the truth. The likelihood of any of us detecting a lie is just around 50%, the same as that of a coin toss. Experienced interviewers are no better, however they are far more confident in their abilities of lie detection than others, as per Friedman.

What compounds the interview illusion is the fact that interviewers rarely receive feedback on their hiring decisions. They don’t get to hear about the candidates they have rejected and whether they have gone on to become successful. Since many of the hired candidates are likely to have succeeded, interviewers wrongly believe that their hiring decision was right, according to Myers.

Then there is the stress of the interview process, which prevents people from revealing their full potential or others from discovering their potential, as per organizational psychologist Adam Grant. Stress is known to affect working memory capacity, the capacity required for executive functions such as analyzing, planning, and decision-making apart from learning and memory. Stress is especially detrimental for people who have been under-estimated in the past, for example, people belonging to racial minority groups. Adam Grant says interviews are set up to fail those people who are victims of negative stereotyping.

Grant also says that interviewers have a predilection for favoring successful candidates over candidates who have faced difficulties, persisted, and are on the way to becoming successful. Many times, candidates who have demonstrated character in persevering through challenges and have the potential to become great are ignored in favor of others who have shown past performance.

Then there is the problem with introverts, comprising more than 50% of the population. Introverts are, unlike extroverts, sensitive to stimulation and avoid situations of over-stimulation. According to Susan Cain, author of ‘Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Cannot Stop Talking,’ introverts are often sensitive to sights, sounds, smells, and pain. They have difficulty when being observed (at work, say, or performing at a music recital) or judged for general worthiness, for example, during a date or interview.

So, if interviews are unreliable, even worse than tarot-reading (well, almost), what is the alternative? We will discuss this in the next issue.