Who made Interviews the boss of Recruitment?
July 15, 2024
Who made interviews the boss of recruitment? A boss who can’t get the job done. A boss who leaves you to clean up the mess after another hiring failure.
There’s got to be a better way! Hang on, there is……
Interviews are a breeding ground for poor hiring decisions. Let’s look at the facts.
- Many answers are either rehearsed or spontaneous embellishment/fiction and they negatively impact hiring accuracy. (Levashina et al. 2014 describe deceptive impression management as contaminating the interview because interviewers find it hard to identify when applicants are using impression management).
- Interviewers often use stereotypes to judge whether a candidate passed the interview and therefore unfairly bias the results. (Purkiss et al 2006 found that an applicant with the ethnic name, speaking with an accent, was viewed less positively by interviewers than the ethnic named applicant without an accent and non-ethnic named applicants with and without an accent).
- Interviewers often make up their mind about a candidate early in an interview regardless of their subsequent answers (Naim et al, 2016 found that if an interviewee performs well for the first question, it is more likely that he/she will end up receiving an above average rating. It is true in the opposite case as well; if an interviewee performs poorly in the first question, he/she is more likely to receive a poor overall rating).
I could go on.
And yet we still see interviews as central if not the only part of our selection process. We’ve been slaves to the ‘stock standard’ recruitment process without sitting back and realising its significant failures. Even the best interview with the right questions, no bias and trained interviewers is not sufficient if you want consistent high performers.
Interviews fail to provide sufficient insight into actual job skills, behavioural preferences, cultural alignment and interpersonal dynamics that are the real determinants of workplace success.
Leading companies know that a multi-faceted assessment strategy is required to truly evaluate talent. This includes combining structured interviews and detailed reference checks with personality profiles, aptitude tests and skills exercises.
Think you can’t afford the time and money to introduce these additional tools. But have you compared this cost to the true cost of a failed recruitment exercise? The true cost needs to be quantified based on:
- time and lost productivity to manage and dismiss the ‘wrong’ hire and wait for the next new hire to get up to speed
- time and cost to re-advertise and re-run the selection process
- time and cost of re-training another new staff member.
Research by Robert Half in 2021 found that a bad hire can bring a financial cost to an employer of between 15%-21% of that employee’s salary. Others suggest it’s a lot higher. However, the personal cost to you – your time and stress – comes from the potentially hundreds of hours managing an underperformer.
