INTERVIEW RESEARCH SHOWS THAT…
A research conducted in 2020 by Yu and Kuncel compared the recommendations of expert PhD psychologists working for a global consulting firm against a weighted average of 7 scores given to the same candidates by those same psychologists (computed by a multiple regressions model) in predicting actual job performance of 847 managers.
The correlation found between expert psychologists’ judgments to actual job performance scores was 0.15, which is not far from the chances of predicting fit by a coin toss.
The correlation between the statistical model (the weighted average of 7 scores) and actual job performance was 0.32.
Apply statistical models to make better hiring decisions.
THE TALE OF THE PREDECTIVE INTERVIEW
Danny was a 21 year old psychologist that was drafted to the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) after his studies.
In 1951, after a short attempt as a combat soldier he was assigned to the IDF’s Psychology Unit. He quickly discovered that his commander, the chief of the psychology unit, was a chemist. That’s how he found himself, after two years of psychology studies, as the only psychology expert in the army.
Amongst the tasks he was assigned was to improve the initial interview with candidates for army service so it would better predict success in the service. By that time, the interviewers (diagnosticians) would ask whatever they want and their impression was open ended and with a “clinical” nature.
Danny took the questions and changed them to focus on candidates’ actual behaviors instead of self perceptions. For each question he attached a 1-5 scoring scale. Overall he created 4 structured scores + 1 additional score for the interviewer’s overall impression.
The interviewers hated it and told him “you are turning us into robots”
The aggregate of the 5 scores has a high predictive power - it predicts success in the army service, promotion up to lieutenant colonel level, and is being utilized up until this day.
The integration of the structured score with the more intuitive score provides enhanced prediction, especially in comparison to the intuitive score.
Our Danny is of course Daniel Kahaneman, the economist and Nobel Prize laureate for his work on judgment and decision making.
Be Danny, Go structured!
#informedecisions #assessment #bias #hiring #interviews #interviewbestpractices #skillsbasedhiring
DON’T BE A DEPENDENT INTERVIEWER
Interviewing with others?
Do you?
• Exchange texts/comments with your fellow interviewers during the interview?
• Kick ‘em underneath the table?
• Exchange looks or roll your eyes?
• Immediately after the interview ends, start discussing the candidate?
If you answered yes to one or more of the above, you are a dependent interviewer.
Dependent interviewers knowingly or unknowingly influence each others’ view of the candidate. This undermines the entire goal of having multiple interviewers—to gain multiple and diverse perspectives of the candidate.
Dependent evaluations create groupthink, contagion of bias, and they hurt your interview process’s accuracy and fairness. It also undermines efficiency and time to hire since you will probably need more interviews to make up your mind.
So what can you do in order to become an independent interviewer:
STOP doing all of the above.
Upon completing an interview - each interviewer should first provide their evaluations (scores and summary) separately and only then discuss.
DO NOT change your scores after the discussion - research has shown that a simple average of independent evaluations out predicts each one of the separate evaluations.
#informedecisions #bias #interviews #recruiting #hiring #assessment
#informedecisions #recruiting #hiring #assessment