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« Back to the October 2006 Explorer newsletter
BEST PRACTICES
Don’t Forget about the Interview!
Mark C. Healy, De Anza College
So your ATS and resume-scanning system is fully deployed, and you’ve implemented online assessment for your sales, engineering and customer service openings. You have IT on your side, the job portal looks great, and your company is headed towards best practices in recruitment, selection, and hiring.
But there’s something else you may need to attend to. Your Regional Manager in Sacramento just asked a strong candidate for an Accountant role what she would like to be doing five years from now. Halfway across the country, a Store Manager just asked a Cashier candidate if he prefers Coke or Pepsi… and why.
Interviewing is performed in a variety of ways, and nearly 100% of searches for a full-time, permanent employee involve some kind of verbal interaction in order to assess a candidate’s fitness for work. To be sure, the overall accuracy of hiring systems depends as much on the quality of the interviews as it does on resume sorting, tests and assessments, and other pre-screening activities. You want to make sure your recruiters and hiring managers do this right.
Still, there are many options for planning your next improvement to your hiring or other HR or training functions. So why should a more systematic approach to interviewing be your next important people strategy? There are three main reasons:
- It has been proven time- and time-again to add value;
- it’s comparatively cheap; and,
- there is a lot of information on good interviewing techniques and there are many professionals who know how to implement comprehensive interviewing programs.
Much is known about how interviews work
The employment interview has been analyzed via thousands of rigorous research studies, and what is known about this usually informal, unstructured conversation is rather grim:
- Interviewers tend to use their “gut reactions” to form their impression of a candidate within just a few minutes.
- Questions asked during the interview are often unrelated to the job.
- Negative impressions are unduly weighted.
- Attractiveness of the candidate and similarity to the interviewer drive impressions of overall fitness for the role.
- Interviewers usually use a general impression of a candidate to make hiring decisions and are often unable to rate or discern competence in different skills. (see note 1)
By systematizing an organization’s interview process, one may be much more successful at filling open positions with good employees. Specifically, “structuring” interviews involves choosing the questions that assess the most important job duties, ensuring every interviewer asks these same questions, utilizing a rating and scoring system, integrating data with other interviewers, and ensuring adequate note-taking and follow-up questioning. Moreover, interviewers must be trained to use interview guides and should practice conducting interviews. Numerous studies point to vast improvements in selection system validity and utility when using a structured approach like this. (see note 2)
Skeptical managers, however, wonder just how much better a structured, scientifically-valid interview can be. They may not be too thrilled to interview job candidates, but they’ve brought in some good people over the years, and no one they hired has burned down a factory (yet.) But most of us think we’re “good judges of character” and many experienced interviewers confuse assessment of qualifications with clever conversation and wordplay. This is not the domain of the incompetent or inexperienced manager; rather, personal theories about how to interview candidates are the norm. (For example, one talented, highly experienced training manager told the author that the best interview question she ever used was, “It’s 25 years from now. What is on page 120 of your autobiography?”)
It’s cheap and worth it
The cost-of-entry for a rigorous interviewing system is quite low relative to other HR interventions and external costs. For less than $25,000 annually, most companies can train their recruiting staff and hiring managers in a standardized, structured approach. One may creatively spend even less in a small- or medium-sized company. Whereas your budget may be tight this year, compare this to, for example, executive recruitment or the cost of a compensation analysis, and the value becomes even clearer.
Many people know how to do this correctly
Several firms and individual consultants have been training organizations in interviewing for decades. In particular, Behavioral Technologies, DDI, and PDI have standardized this process, subjected it to a great deal of scrutiny, and defended their products in court. In addition to the vast array of books and manuals available, there are many people happy to tell you how to do this right, with the usual variation in features and emphasis. You just have to listen.
This doesn’t seem particularly fun or innovative
I know, I know. It’s not really thought-provoking or glamorous, but the best hiring systems aren’t. Actually, this is precisely what makes them effective. The most valid and accurate methods of hiring the best and screening out the worst don’t involve any clever questions, complicated weighting formulas, or deceptive assessment of your innermost thoughts, dreams, and motivations. Almost as a rule, the best hiring systems feature little hocus-pocus or arcane terminology.
Simulations and work samples and direct tests of job knowledge are often thought of as the most accurate hiring tools. So it follows that asking people specifically about job situations and, more specifically about how they have handled (or would handle) real workplace issues represents a more accurate method of discovering if they have what it takes to do the job. Accuracy increases as the interview focuses more and more on essential job duties and critical outcomes.
HR thinks this is too much work
Converting your organization to a structured interviewing system can be a lot of work, but only because real change and improvement in a firm almost always requires sustained action. For example, companies often find it worthwhile to build new factories, reorganize their sales forces, and sink millions into unproven products. In contrast, taking valuable HR and management time to do interviewing correctly represents a positive, cheap, calculated risk relative to many other “people programs.”
Let’s get started
There are essentially two broad objectives when implementing a structured interviewing program:
- Asking the right questions, based on a job analysis and linked to real work behavior (and creating interview guides based on this information).
- Training your employees how to use the interview guides.
Most approaches to structured interviewing advocate and provide what are usually known as “behavioral” questions, though some systems utilize “situational judgment” questions as well. Thorough systems include a job analysis process that helps those in charge of hiring match competencies and questions to actual job duties and build a set of interview guides.
The most difficult — but fruitful — activity involves training interviewers. Consistency is the key outcome, and how to ask questions and rate responses, collaborate on candidate decision making with other interviewers, and communicate with job candidates represent key skills that one can take to virtually any future job situation. Customization of an interviewing product is often unnecessary, especially if the system is to be implemented company-wide, across many jobs, and standardized, off-the-shelf systems are usually fine and up to the task.
Summary
The most important reason to implement structured interviewing is that the quality of your current interviewing process is placing a ceiling on your ability to correctly match candidates to jobs. By not addressing problems and inconsistencies in interviewing, you reduce the impact of your otherwise solid recruitment and selection practices. While much of hiring seems like a crapshoot, the best companies attempt to reduce this crapshoot; just remember that you may not see results instantly. However, you’ll be glad you implemented better interviewing processes in your organization and will truly be contributing to best practices in recruitment and hiring.
Notes and References
- Aamodt, M. G. (2007). Industrial/Organizational psychology: An applied approach. Belmont, CA: Thomson/Wadsworth.
- McDaniel, M. A., Whetzel, D. L., Schmidt, F. L., & Maurer, S. D. (1994). The validity of employment interviews: A comprehensive review and meta-analysis. Journal of Applied Psychology, 79, 599-616.
About the Author
Mark C. Healy is a consultant, teacher, and writer based in Oakland, California. He assists companies with the development of their human capital strategy and designs hiring, leadership development, and training programs. His recent clients include Genentech, Market-Up, and Wachovia Bank. He is affiliated with Rocket-Hire in New Orleans, Louisiana and Integral Talent Solutions of Palo Alto, California. Mark has published articles in journals such as Personnel Psychology and Human Performance and has presented research at conferences of the Society for Industrial/Organizational Psychology and the Decision Sciences Institute. He teaches General and Business Psychology and Statistics at De Anza College in Cupertino, California. Mark received an MA in Industrial/Organizational Psychology from The University of Akron. He may be reached at
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