A job interview is not an appearance on Letterman
October 18, 2024
The question “tell me about yourself” has no place in job interviews.
A job interview is not an appearance on Letterman.
And yet many job interviewers think its ok to ask Letterman style questions.
Vague open ended questions that could take you all kinds of places.
Like “tell me about yourself”.
So why is Letterman asking these types of questions?
To get interesting answers that get people to like his guest.
Letterman isn’t assessing a person for their capability to perform a specific job.
And a job interview isn’t a test to see whether you like someone.
Instead, a job interview is one of hopefully a number of assessments in the process aimed at getting specific data that can tell you the likelihood that this candidate will be a high performer in a specific role.
It’s targeted, its precise and that is how you run a fair and accurate process.
In job interviews, some ask the vague open-ended questions like “tell me about yourself” to gauge the following from the candidate:
- Their personality
- Their values
- Their cultural fit
- How articulate they are
- Whether they can think on their feet
- Whether they promote themselves
- The list goes on…..
That all sounds reasonable right? Problem is these answers are NOT a valid and reliable measure. You can’t get validity and reliability with one or two questions.
Have you ever seen a valid and reliable personality assessment with just one or two questions? Of course not. There are multiple dimensions to personality and multiple questions are required on each dimension to ensure we can rely on the answers as an accurate representation of the person.
And yet we kid ourselves that we have understood a candidate’s values, personality and cultural fit from one or two vague open-ended questions in an interview.
And a person’s capability to promote themselves, think on their feet and be articulate might be nice to haves but if they have little relationship with being a high performer in the specific role you are recruiting for, then you’ve just acquired some irrelevant data. And that irrelevant data included in your candidate evaluation will more likely lead you to say yes to a person who can’t do the job you’ve hired them for.
The vague-open ended question is to recruitment what the fruit bowl is to workplace mental health – irrelevant. We tell ourselves it works but it doesn’t because the evidence tells us it doesn’t. The literature shows that unstructured interviews can lead interviewers to evaluate candidates on irrelevant information. They also increase susceptibility to biases, are poor predictors of job performance and can actually hurt predictive accuracy compared to not even interviewing at all.
