WHAT FACTORS CAN UNDERMINE AN INTERVIEW’S USEFULNESS?
Several things can undermine an interview’s usefulness. We explain these next, since knowledge of the mistakes is the first step in avoiding them. in the following section we’ll then discuss how to avoid the mistakes.
Snap judgments
One of the most consistent findings in the interviewing literature is that interviewers tend to jump to conclusions make snap judgments about candidates during the first few minutes of the interview or even before the interview begins, access to candidates’ test scores biased the interviewer’s ultimate assessment of the candidate. in another study the interview results on a candidate were related to the decision about hiring only when the candidate also had low passing scores on a selection test. for candidates with high test scores, the interview results were not related to the interviewers’ decisions. another researcher estimated that in 85% of the cases interview had made up their minds about candidates befour the interview began on the basis of application forms and personal appearance.
Findings like these underscore that it’s important for a candidate to start off on the right foot with the interviewer. for better or worse, interviewers usually make up their minds about candidates during the first few minutes of the interview, and prolonging the interview past this point usually adds little to changr decisions.
Negative emphasis
Jumping to conclusions is especially troublesome when the information the interviewer has about the candidate is negative. For example, one study found that interviewers who perviously received unfavorable reference letters gave the applicants less credit for past successes and held them more personally responsible for past failures after the interview. furthermore, the interviewers’ final decisions to accept or reject applicants were always tied to what they expected of the applicants based on the references, quite aside from their interview performance.
in other words, interviewers seem to have a consistent negative bias. they are generally more influenced by unfavorable than favorable information the candidate. and their impressions are much more likely to change from favorable to unfavorable than from unfavorable to favorable. a common interviewing mistake is to make the interview itself mostly a search for negative information. in a sense, therefore, most interviews are probably loaded against the applicant. an applicant who is initially rated could easily end up with a low rating, given the fact that unfavorable information tends carry more weight in the interview. an interviewee who starts out with a poor rating will find it hard to overcome that first bad impression during the interview.