The Problem with Job Interviews
They’re really not a great way to assess a candidate’s potential, but they can be helpful if you do them right.
Good morning!
Here are today’s highlights:
Julian Scadden says even the trades need to think about AI-proofing their businesses.
Kate Morgan would rather be called “bold” than the other B-word, but she’s willing to own that one, too.
Even in Texas and Florida, the immigration crackdown is affecting the economy.
Gary Kunkle explains why slow, sustained growth is far healthier than fast growth.
HIRING
Job interviews are flawed, but there is a way to make them better: “If you had to construct a really bad way to make an important decision, you might come up with something like the stereotypical job interview. You must intuit a complete stranger’s ability and character in a small window of time, before making a commitment that could last decades. Some candidates will be so tense that asking them how their journey was will cause them to have a nervous breakdown. Everyone will be pretending to be someone they are not.”
“If this sounds like an irretrievably broken process, then the truth is more complex. Interviews have a reasonable claim to be the most useful part of the selection process. But they have to be conducted in the right way. And their flaws must be compensated for.”
“Researchers try to assess the validity of selection processes by correlating the scores that successful candidates get during an application with their subsequent performance in their new jobs. A meta-analysis of such research, published in 2022 by Paul Sackett of the University of Minnesota and his co-authors, found that structured job interviews have the most predictive value of any recruitment method, ahead of things like assessment centres or psychometric tests.”
“There are two big caveats to this endorsement of interviews, however. The first is the importance of the word ‘structured.’ According to Winfred Arthur of Texas a&m University, that usually means a standardized set of job-related questions which are put to every candidate and each of which is scored according to an agreed system. An unstructured interview, in which hiring managers make things up on the fly and reach decisions based on gut instincts, has less than half the predictive validity of a structured one.”
“The second caveat is that even textbook interviews are not that good at predicting how candidates will do. According to Chris Hartwell of Utah State University, the research suggests that less than 20 percent of a person’s actual job performance can be attributed to scores in a structured interview. So it makes sense to layer lots of other assessments on top: specific personality tests, work samples, and the like.” READ MORE
