Are job interviews useless?

One of the books I took along with me on a recent vacation was Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior by Ori and Rom Brafman. At one point the authors discuss a body of research showing that interviews are generally poor predictors of a candidate’s future performance on a job.

The problem lies mainly in the types of questions asked in a typical job interview and the interviewer’s over-inflated confidence in their ability to judge people’s merit. Many interview questions are soft and fuzzy (“What are your greatest strengths and weaknesses? How would you describe yourself?”). They are rarely going to elicit candid responses. Neither are the kinds of questions that ask candidates to imagine themselves five years in the future or lay out their whole career path. Interviewees will generally prepare stock replies, gloss over their actual faults, and put on a performance.

Interviewers know this, but they still think that they can identify the right candidate based on the kind of performance and on the rapport established during the interview. In actuality, this kind of unstructured interview isn’t a reliable indicator of how well a candidate will do on a job. (Also, managers are often looking for people who are similar to them and to other employees, when in fact it might be more beneficial to have someone who complements others in personality and ability; for instance, if you’ve got a team of energetic and dynamic risk-takers, you might want someone who’s more cautious and low-key to provide balance.)

One suggestion for improvement that’s made in the book is to change the format of the interview. Instead of having it unfold in an unstructured and conversational style, interviewers could include some formal tests measuring abilities relevant to the job. They could also add more questions that are concrete and shed light on an interviewee’s thought processes. For example, an interviewer could ask questions involving “what-if” scenarios (“What if you’re organizing a fund-raiser and the caterer backs out two days before?” “What if your star employee suddenly starts to show up to work late everyday?”).