Why job interviews are worse than handwriting analysis

If you are using interviewing as your primary tool of selection, you may as well switch to using handwriting analysis. Hand-writing analysis is simply worthless in deciding who could be a good employee. Interviewing is actually better, but only very marginally. As a tool for recruiting prospective employees, interviewing is, well, worthless.

Interviewers worldwide often place great confidence in their ability to predict on-the-job performance from unstructured interviews. However, a wealth of research reveals that interviews are less predictive of job performance than a host of other, less utilized tools. In fact, you could just give a simple test of vocabulary and arithmetic and be done with it. Your selection will be much better.

There are a number of reasons why unstructured interviewing, which is the most common method of interviewing, is not a scientifically valid method of recruiting. We will start with the easily understood part and will then proceed to the most critical reasons.

First, Prof Allen Huffcutt, who researches interviewing processes, says most interviewers ask extremely poor questions and ignore highly relevant information. Read that again: most interview questions are useless. Ori Brafman and Rom Brafman (Authors, ‘Sway’) reveal Prof Huffcutt’s list of 10 most commonly asked interview questions. Out of these 10, only one is somewhat useful.

1.      Why should we hire you?

2.      What are your greatest strengths and weaknesses?

3.      How would you describe yourself?

4.      What do you see yourself doing five years from now?

5.      What do you want to earn five years from now?

6.      What do you really want to do in life?

7.      What college subjects did you like the best and the least?

8.      Why do you want to work with us?

9.      Why did you leave your last job?

10.  What do you know about our company?

In the first place, by virtue of these being common questions, Prof Huffcutt says most candidates will be expecting these questions and will be well prepared anyway. Why should we hire you? Come on, you called me for an interview after scanning my resume and now asking why you should hire me. Well, that’s quite funny. Here is why I stand out from the rest of the crowd. I will then launch into my well-rehearsed answer, and we will all smile, knowing fully well the hollowness of the question and its answer.

The second question about strengths and weaknesses is where it gets interesting. Folks have no problem listing strengths. We all over-estimate ourselves, as Dunning and Kruger have discovered, and an interview is an opportunity to prove the Dunning-Kruger effect. When it comes to weaknesses, again, it is no problem. Now, everyone knows how to disguise a strength in the form of a weakness and score a point in the interview from hapless interviewers, who also know in all likelihood that this is a well-trained response.

How would you describe yourself? As if there is a dearth of adjectives in this world! People can come up with responses like ‘proactive,’ ‘team player,’ ‘result-driven,’ ‘hands-on’, and other such silly worn-out phrases which will have no bearing on the future performance, even if a canny interviewer follows up this response with ‘show me the evidence.’  Evidence will be available pre-cooked, ready to be door-delivered.

The next 3 questions force you to gaze into the future and make predictions. What do you see yourself doing five years from now? Do you know what you will be doing one year from now? How will one know about five years? Granted, everyone has grandiose plans for the future, including replacing the interviewers at the target company, at least for their poor interview questions, if not for their money. But these grand plans are not to be disclosed to anyone, the least to someone sitting across the table smirking and making judgments about you. Hence, you will respond with something diplomatic, such as ‘advancing to the next levels’ or something more earth-shattering as ‘contributing to the bottom line’.

The question about future earnings is similarly irrelevant. While everyone wants more, most are painfully aware of the pathetic salaries being offered by the target company and, hence, would rather be polite than sincere. What do you really want to do in life? Honestly, all you want to do now is find a job to pay the bills and have some extra cash to afford a foreign trip, and the life purpose can come later. But that is not what the interviewer is expecting. He is searching for your vision, your mission, and your larger-than-life goals for humanity. Again, even if you have one, why will you reveal your true intentions? So, the answer will usually be what the interviewer wants to hear- something aligned with the vision of the company itself- such as building a sustainable world, even when your only interest is in sustaining your world.

Professor Huffcutt says the next 3 questions convert the candidate into a historian. Research shows that when we recollect past events, we reconstruct them. So, every time we recollect a past event, it gets modified. They need not be the truth. Why did you leave/are leaving the last company? Why are you seeking a job here? Honestly speaking, there is a vacancy and the company needs people. You can do better in life with a better-paying job. Everyone, including the interviewers, has changed jobs for such reasons. However, when it comes to interviews, they want deeper, philosophical answers. For example, an opportunity to improve the customer experience, to make a difference in the world, to gain a different experience, and sometimes, to ‘gain more knowledge’ (even though this knowledge could be simply about the amount the company is willing to pay for coming well prepared for an interview).

Thus, all these nine questions are designed to invite a theatrical ‘performance’ from the candidate, who is well-versed in this fine art. None of the questions or answers can provide any insights into how the candidate will perform on the job, even if the candidate provides truthful answers.

Finally, according to Prof Huffcutt, the only question that is somewhat better than the rest of the lot is the final one, which at least shows how much effort the person has invested in getting to know the company.

If you are a senior executive, you are likely to protest that these questions are usually asked only for junior and middle levels, and senior personnel are recruited mostly based on industry experience and track record, which are mostly publicly known. If this is the case, let me break it out to you: studies show that often senior leaders get hired irrespective of their track record or even despite their poor track record. I will deal with this in a future sequel to this article.

I am not sure if Prof Huffcutt has included data from India. The most common question asked in India (by extremely lazy interviewers) is, most likely, “Tell me about yourself.” Of course, this is not different from the above ten questions, and well-prepared candidates are likely to answer this question by combining their answers to most of these ten questions. This gives the candidate enough flexibility to stitch a convincing story of trials and tribulations, redemptions, and 'robust' performances. Again, worthless as far as the predictability of future performance is concerned.

Talking of utterly wasteful questions, I cannot leave out the question ‘Tell me about your family details,’ mostly asked by HR colleagues attending the interview, with great pride. Sometimes, the main interviewer asks this question so as to steal the thunder from the HR lady. While the answer to this question can reveal absolutely nothing useful about the candidate, it is often asked ostensibly to ‘put the candidate at ease,’ ‘to gauge the values, personality,’ or even to judge ‘the communication skills.’ Well, it does nothing of that sort, and on the contrary, anything that the candidate say can be used against them. If the objective is to put the candidate at ease, the best thing one can do is to ask no questions. If you are judging communication skills from an interview, god help you. Even personality tests like Myers–Briggs cannot reliably and consistently predict the personality of a person, and here you are trying to figure it out from one question (or two). In a sequel to this article, I will show how progressive thinking organizations make their candidates comfortable, if at all they have to conduct an interview.

So, what is the alternative to asking worn-out questions? Asking ‘out of the box’ questions, which appear to be brain-teasers? Organizational psychologist Adam Grant says asking brain-teasers is a favorite pastime of some senior-level interviewers. For example, they may ask something like, ‘How many golf balls can you fit in a jumbo jet?’. Grant wonders why anyone would fill a jumbo jet with golf balls. Such questions are not asked to get a correct answer, the people who are fascinated with this type of questions will argue. They place a mirror into the thinking of the candidate, they say. That’s rubbish. Instead, Grant says, it places a mirror into the mind of the interviewer. A study found that interviewers who were most likely to ask such questions were narcissists and sadists. Grant’s conclusion: asking brain-teasers may make you feel smart, but it actually makes you look like a jerk.

A wealth of research, from Nobel Laureate the late Daniel Kahneman to social psychologist Richard Nisbett and others, shows that interviews are poor predictors of future performance. The reasons are not just the poor questions. And we could use much better tools. Please stay tuned for the second part of this article, where I discuss the important reasons why unstructured interviews are a waste of time.