Job interviews are useless

Employers tend to trust their intuitions. But when they decide whom to hire, they trust those intuitions more than they should.

Suppose you are considering two candidates for a job in sales, candidate A and candidate B, and have interviewed both. You were far more impressed with candidate A, who was dynamic, engaging and immensely likable. By contrast, candidate B was a bit awkward and reserved, and so seemed to be an inferior “fit.”

Both candidates have taken an aptitude test that relates to the job; their personnel files also contain their scores on a general intelligence test. On both tests, candidate A was just OK; candidate B performed superbly.

Which will you choose? If you are like a lot of people, the answer is candidate A.

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A lot of evidence suggests in cases of this kind, employers will stubbornly trust their intuitions – and are badly mistaken to do so. Specific aptitude tests turn out to be highly predictive of performance in sales, and general intelligence tests are almost as good. Interviews are far less useful at telling you who will succeed.

Unstructured interviews have been found to have surprisingly little value in a variety of areas. In law schools, my own experience is faculties emphasize how aspiring law professors do in one-on-one interviews – which usually provide no information about how they will do as teachers or researchers.

Most people in human resources are fully aware objective measures are helpful. Yet the overwhelming majority in these positions believe executives “can learn more from an informal discussion with job candidates.” In general, that’s wrong.

Some evidence suggests interviews are far worse than wasteful: By drawing employers’ attention to irrelevant information, they can produce inferior decisions. For example, people make better predictions about student performance if they are given access to objective background information, such as grades and test scores – and prevented from conducting interviews entirely.

So why do employers continue to give so much weight to interviews? The simple answer is people trust what they see and hear, and rely on their own feelings even when they shouldn’t. But as Yale University management professor Jason Dana and his collaborators have shown, there’s more to it.

Dana’s central finding is that interviewers work very hard to make sense of whatever interviewees end up saying. If you are conducting an interview, you will quickly form an initial impression of the candidate, and you will be inclined to assess his or her answers in a way that fits with that initial impression.

To confirm that point, Dana instructed interviewees to give random answers to questions – answers that had nothing to do with their natural response. Even then, interviewers said in post-interview surveys they received valuable information.

Dana’s explanation was interviewers made sense of the answers they got by weaving those answers into a coherent narrative about candidates, even when the responses were deliberately worthless.

Interviews can also give effect to biases, conscious or unconscious. If interviewers are prejudiced against women or Hispanics, for example, a face-to-face interview will predictably result in discrimination. Reliance on tests, or on performance, can promote equality.

For business, government and education, the lesson is clear: People ought to be relying far more on objective information and far less on interviews. They might even want to think about scaling back or canceling interviews altogether. •

Cass R. Sunstein is a Bloomberg View columnist.

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