Mar

1

Interviewing.

Filed Under Job Search, Science & Technology | 1 Comment

Company A and Company B sell similar products, operate almost exclusively within a particular region, and are similarly sized and organized. Company A, when it is hiring new employees, takes into account various factors gleaned from applicants’ resumes (e.g. past work experience, college GPA, etc.) and from its internal testing mechanisms (e.g. psychology testing, drug testing). Company B takes into account similar factors, but also takes into account applicant’s interview performance.

Let’s assume for the moment that you can measure hiring success on purely economic terms. The more profit derived from a particular employee, the better the hiring decision. Of course, to measure this properly, you must not only consider, for example, the employee’s average output rate or sales figures, but also the cost of his training, adjusted for length of service, his salary, his benefits, etc.

Would you expect that:

  1. Company B, on the average, makes better hiring decisions than Company A,
  2. Company A, on the average, makes better hiring decisions than Company B, or
  3. Company A and Company B, on the average, make roughly the same level hiring decisions?

Conventional wisdom seems to suggest choice #1. Which explains why most firms, when hiring new employees, incorporate interviews as part of the hiring process.

From what I remember from a cognitive science class at Rutgers in which I was enrolled, most research has suggested choice #3. And some of the research actually points to choice #2. Which is to say that interviewing is at best worthless, and at worst a detriment to good hiring decisionmaking. The class materials focused on the psychological explanation for this phenomenon, speculating that people believe themselves to be very good at gleaning useful information from interviews, but are very bad at it.

What puzzles me, given the wealth of information on this subject, is how few firms are even experimenting with interview-blind hiring, especially given the cost. What I am herein hypothesizing is that, while momentum and tradition most likely explain the lack of a great deal of change, there are other functions that interviews serve beyond assisting in the actual decisionmaking that are of value.

I suspect, first and foremost, that the interview process is intended to weed out nonserious applicants. Because no sane person enjoys the interview process, a firm can invite its ten best applicants-on-paper to interview, then axe from the running the five that do not show up. In this day-and-age especially, in which it is so simple to apply for most jobs–no more trips to the copy shop or the post office–it is useful for a firm to carve out the “dedicated” applicants from the “why not?” applicants by placing the time consuming and stressful hurdle of the interview on the track.

I also suspect that the interview process is intended as a precursor for more relevant and functional factor procurement. While the interviewer may gain absolutely no useful knowledge by talking to the applicant, she may very well use the opportunity to obtain an up-to-date resume, conduct or schedule testing of some sort, or the like.

There is also, likely, an introductory process that is of some value. By forcing an applicant to interview, the interviewer may convey certain information about where the firm is located, what type of attire is expected, and where the good lunch places in the area are. The interviewer can also make sure that the employee manual or similar information is personally handed to the applicant, reducing the likelihood that the applicant can later claim ignorance because of the firm’s failure to communicate.

So is the interview process actually a worthwhile one, even though it provides nothing useful in assisting the firm in its hiring decisions? Perhaps. Do I think firms should be more aggressive about actually conducting a cost-benefit analysis on the practice? Absolutely.


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1 Comment so far

  1. Jeff on March 1, 2006 3:54 pm

    After going through all this I’m pretty sure Company A will make it to Boston before Company B makes it to New York.

    Also, I doubt I’ll get a job so all this interview jibba-jabba is just that: jibba-jabba.