OFFICIAL DEFINITION
The purpose of a job interview is to allow an employer to evaluate the personal and professional qualities of a potential employee.
RAZER DEFINITION
The purpose of the job interview today is as it was at the time of its creation: largely for the amusement of the employer. Originally, Thomas Edison. Although notoriously devout in the creation of his own myth as an inventor, it does seem likely that Edison introduced a crucial nuisance to 20th-century recruitment: the psychometric test.
In 1921, The New York Times reported on the letters of complaint received from “victims” of the employment test, one of whom decried the ordeal not as a “Tom Edison test” but a test of Tom Foolery. “What is the first line in The Aeneid?” he wanted to know. Of cabinet makers, the polymath would ask, “Who was the Roman emperor when Jesus Christ was born?”
Nikola Tesla really ought to have kicked that bloke’s arse.
WHY IT MATTERS
Job interview techniques matter most to the people paid to “reinvent” them in Business and Management Schools. There is very little research indicating that formal or informal interview techniques are useful in predicting job performance. There is a good deal written by scholars and in popular press about the uselessness of job interviews. Nonetheless, the darn things persist.
They persist, and they persist in reinforcing rather than counteracting cultural prejudices. Until the scientistic veneer pioneered by Edison, and by psychologist Robert S. Woodworth, is displaced from the process, employers will continue to justify their choice of candidates with shonky tests and hoity toity terms, like “cultural fitness”.
Notwithstanding that Edison’s original test was chiefly intended as (another) project of Edison-aggrandisement, the Western 20th century did demand some form of instrumentalised recruitment. Physical fitness had been the only requirement to secure unskilled paid work in the industrial age. With the rise of knowledge or white-collar work, new mass techniques were required. We just haven’t come up with anything good, yet.
WHO CARES?
In a time of underemployment and wealth inequality, the job interview can tend to reveal its inadequacies more readily to cash- and time-poor candidates. The process is, correctly, perceived by many job seekers less as an obstacle to overcome or a battle to win and more as a charade to endure. Thus, it is in the interests of the well-funded business and management departments at universities or the well-paid human resources executive to make the thing most of us know is a joke appear meaningful, lest we all laugh them out of their bullshit jobs.
The job interview process is risible. Not only is the indignity inflicted on casual labourers seeking low-skill work such as telemarketing, but it is imposed often in a “group interview” setting with the one-size-fits-most language of the Leadership Industry trickling down to minimum wage workers.
RELEVANT FACTS
- A 2009 field audit conducted by the Australian National University found that the cultural origin of an applicant’s name affected the chance of being granted a job interview. Applicants with Chinese names were the most significantly overlooked.
- Yale University psychologists published a study in 2013 suggesting that the dominant conversational interview style is a poor predictor of job performance.
- Anecdata suggests the question most often asked in English language job interviews to be: “What is your greatest weakness?” Instinct suggests the applicant should make no reference to their propensity for theft of office supplies.
- Some research indicates women seeking employment in male-dominated sectors are likely to be interrupted more often during the interview process.
THE LAST WORD
At around the time Edison was devising his idiosyncratic torture test, the Woodworth Psychoneurotic Inventory was introduced. This was initially designed to test World War I recruits for their resistance to shell shock, but became a standard in US white-collar employment until the 1930s.
After World War II, the reckless hits just kept on coming with the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). Inspired by the nutty Carl Jung and devised by a mother and daughter team of personality hobbyists, the MBTI is the cockroach of psychological fads: it just won’t die. Yet, the widely discredited self-report survey is still used today as an instrument in elite and minimum-wage recruitment.
The predictive power of this recruitment testing may be roughly equivalent to horoscopes, but this can be said of most Western job interview techniques, lately attempting a revival by the use of virtual reality. If there is any purpose at all to job interviews beyond the maintenance of business and management schools, it is to test the tolerance of candidates for the absolute nonsense they will likely endure in the workplace.
FURTHER READING
Brenda L Berkelaar 2017 Different ways new information technologies influence conventional organizational practices and employment relationships: The case of cybervetting for personnel selection
Frontiers in Psychology Editorial: Impression Management and Faking in Job Interviews 2017
Peterson, R (2001). History of Frequent Flyer Programs. WebFlyer, May.
2012 Why workplaces must resist the cult of personality testing The Conversation
Wage slave propaganda from the running dogs at TED Talks (video)
Nah, most businesses these days don’t put any rigour into the job interview. They’re either the public service where nobody ever checks anything with the result that nutters who are “off with the pixies” can get high-paying jobs in government departments (https://indaily.com.au/news/2018/11/30/sa-public-servant-devised-web-of-deceit) or they use the 6-month “probation” period to sack people who they never should have hired in the first place because they didn’t bother with basic things like references.
I tend to agree.
Also, I only wish job interviews were for my personal amusement. That would be more fun.
While time-consuming and often boring, for the most part I find interviews very helpful and many times the candidate who leads based on the CVs alone doesn’t get the job after interviews – for better and for worse.
From the employee side, I’ve had at least 2 interviews I remember where talking to my prospective bosses in person at the interview has persuaded me I don’t want to work there and I didn’t take the positions when offered. So they can be usefull there too.
Maybe interviews for telemarketer level positions are a bit of guff and some of the testing people do is silly, but that’s not to say interviewing people for jobs is all useless.
Conventional selection rules require that only the most competent applicant may be appointed. This was once intended to limit selectors’ eagerness to appoint someone from their own subculture, which saves managers any effort in effective communication. That worked fine when all applicants were more or less incompetent and the panel’s questions are exhausted in finding the least incompetent.
Nowadays most people can read, write and learn so almost all applicants would do just fine, and selectors drop back into their old ways of digging for religion, community and type of rugby played etc.
The problem would be resolved by randomly selecting from all minimally qualified applicants. Equity would then be achieved in the role of dice.
Helen, as much as I love this series, when I read this article yesterday, I wanted to file it under ‘what was she smoking’?
I think you’ve started with a loaded definition, salted in a smattering of non-sequiturs and ended with a generalisation that is not only false, but irresponsible to even propose without more rigorous examination than you gave it. Your critical thought is usually pretty solid, and your investigations systematic, but this time it looked like you’d eschewed all that, filled a stein with egg-nog after the lid had fallen off the nutmeg, and just pounded the keyboard.
Let’s start with the definition: the purpose of a job interview is not simply for the employer; an employment agreement is by mutual consent, and an interview is for both the candidate and potential employer to meet one another. The value of such a meeting depends on the risk and uncertainty associated with the opportunity: the more you confidently know about one another, the less you need to meet and talk. However, the less you know, the more you can find out in a meeting.
Meetings also do not have to be held formally. They can be informal, dynamic, adaptive. It depends on what information you need, and you can have more than one of them. There can be questions and hypotheticals from both sides. I’d agree that at their worst they’re a pointless procedural face ache, yet at their best, they’re humans collaborating to explore whether they can solve a mutual problem.
In my line of work we solve other peoples’ problems as our core business, yet about 80% of the problems we encounter are not well understood by the organisations suffering them, which is precisely why they call on us in the first place. So we’d literally never accept an engagement without first having met the people thinking of hiring us. As a professional you live and die by your reputation: you’d no more commit to an engagement on paper alone than a doctor would prescribe a treatment without first consulting the patient.
But for any line of work, a job interview gives a candidate an idea of the size of an organisation, how busy it is, where it’s located, the working conditions, what sort of morale it has, how managers treat their staff. It’s a chance to gather information both actively by asking questions, and passively by observing the place itself. This information would only not matter if you were so desperate for work that you’d take the first job offered under any conditions and in any location; but if you’re able to find multiple opportunities or negotiate terms, it counts.
But there are also lines of work where as an employer you’d never hire someone without meeting them first. I happen to be in such a business. Among the things you’d like to establish are whether the candidate presenting on paper is the candidate sitting in the chair, how the candidate presents, communicates, thinks on their feet, responds to opportunity and challenge, exercises initiative, interprets intelligently, has depth and breadth of knowledge, shows empathy, intimacy and respect for your organisation and their past employers, demonstrates sound professional and ethical judgement; plus what qualifications, experience and skills you’d accept on prima facie claims, and which you’d want to dig into and qualify further.
So a priori there’s a lot of value in meeting the people you hope to tie yourself to legally, financially and professionally whether as an employer or employee. The alternative is that you may not be able to distinguish a legitimate employment offer from a phishing scam, or a genuine candidate from a shonk. I think it’s beyond irresponsible to suggest that job-seeking should not involve meeting potential employers without exploring the risks that interviewing is meant to reduce and exploring how they’d be handled without interivew — or what the cost might be of ignoring them.
With regard to your quibbles about how interviews are conducted, I agree that many are conducted incompetently. Since my organisation interviews routinely before we’re hired, we do more interviews than most permanent employees, and I could go on about interviews that are more procedural butt-covering time-wasters than constructive and informative. However, that’s a non-sequitur since your central thesis isn’t whether they can be conducted better (they definitely can), but whether they should be held at all.
Nevertheless, you won’t find me arguing about the dubious legitimacy of Myers-Briggs Type Indicators, or cultural biases in hiring. However you failed to mention that cultural biases also apply to résumés themselves: applicants with cross-cultural names interview far less often than applicants within the same culture. Telling minorities interviews aren’t for them is actually detrimental: getting into interview at all is likely to only help their candidacy.
With regard to gender and interview, I strongly agree that there are cultural factors present, and it varies from organisation to organisation. Gender-balancing interview panels is at best only a tentative first step. There’s a bigger conversation to be had over gender-based socialisation and problem-solving, and how to get the best out of a candidate and an interview. But behind that is another conversation about how much socialisation and problem-solving is gender-based or merely culturally-based and whether we should be changing our education system to give young people experience of a bigger range of socialisation and problem-solving methods with a different range of leadership and consultative styles. Anyway, these concerns pervade entire workplaces, whole careers and social governance too: they’re not specifically an interview issue, and anecdotally, if anything people tend to behave more respectfully in interview than they do once you’ve committed to work together.
With regard to the role of management consulting in hiring practices, I’m in broad agreement: if you don’t understand your hiring problem well enough as an employer, the ceremony and formalism of some fly-in MBA telling you how to do it is unlikely to help you. On the other hand, if you do understand the problem well enough, you may well be able to invent your own solutions and might not need a management consultancy at all. But I believe the real blight on recruitment these days isn’t management consulting so much as recruitment firms. They have the same business model as real estate agents but far less accountability, and do not seem to make hiring smarter and more efficient so much as they simply rent-seek on churning ill-qualified staff. Again, I could rant about this for paragraphs.
But my impression Helen is that the practical field-research is utterly missing from your article. Despite small business-owners employing some 80% of the Australian workforce, I’d bet money that you haven’t sourced thought from a single one of them. You seem to have approached the question as a journalist having grown up in who-you-know industry who hasn’t moved far from that kind of experience, and has made a bunch of idealistic assumptions supported by cherry-picked academic articles.
Not your best work, and while I’d welcome your opinion on business management (or indeed anything else), I’d hope you’d research areas well outside your own lived experience more thoroughly in future.
If you’re over 50 then forget about even getting a job interview. Imagine 17 years on the dole being harassed to suicide by Centrelink for not getting a job. A pox on both your houses, fedgov.
Our over-fifties are too institutionalised, Zeke, which is what makes them powerless and suicidal when institutions want employees young and cheap.
We have untapped capacity to build lifelong skills that would help over-fifties learn to create jobs and not just seek them. I can’t tell you how many over-fifties I know who’ve done this successfully, bringing to bear the life skills, people skills, practicality and world knowledge to find viable opportunities others miss: yet I know so many more who see themselves as leaves in a lifelong storm.
It’s unfair and degrading. We can do better.
I am sorry you perceive a lack of work herein, RD. I can assure you that more than one phone call was made.
The small amount of literature that is critical of job interviewing generally indicates that most forms of it are effing hopeless!
I’ve been interested in the thing for some years after enduring a “group interview” for a minimum wage job. For the many, both the job interview and the “human resource” department serves to maintain a compliant staff and a “cultural fit”.
It makes absolute sense that the process would make absolutely no sense in a market, we are largely agreed, that does *not* reward merit.
Feel free to disagree. I would prefer it, however, if you did not simply suppose that I’ve slacked off!
Helen, thank you for your reply — as gracious and dignified as mine was acerbic. 🙂
I’m glad you’re interested in business management practices. I delight in the breadth of subjects you’re interested in. I’d certainly like to read more from you on the subject since it’s of personal and professional interest to me.
And I’m sorry for hurting your feelings, yet I don’t think my criticism was ill-founded, and it certainly wasn’t an assumption: it was a reasonable inference based on information your own article supplied.
If you’d researched primary sources on why business-owners interview you would and should have quoted them, because it’s both normal and best journalistic practice to offer balance through primary sources. Yet there were no quotes from employers, so what should we infer?
Earlier I quoted from memory a politician who said that small to medium enterprises are responsible for 80% of Australian employment.
I should have known better. It was about 68% in FY14 [1], and typically hovers around that number. I don’t have any data more current, but that looks about right.
Two-thirds of that are small businesses employing less than 20 staff; they represent 97% of all business in Australia, and I can guarantee that they don’t engage management consultants. With 60% of all businesses turning over less than $200,000 annually, many small business-owners can barely afford to pay themselves a full wage.
If you want to talk about the third of employment that comes from large corporate: sure. Much weirdness occurs. Whether public or private sector, large corporate is my idea of workplace insanity. Everyone gets institutionalised, including the executives. Most don’t even realise how institutionalised they are until they retire. Certain temperaments don’t work well in large corporate: mine is one, and I suspect yours may be another.
Could large corporate hiring function without interviews? Some, probably. Yet as a job-seeker I’d definitely still want to meet the team before I signed up.
(Especially if they were trying to sign up me. The act of trying to employ me at all suggests a badly flawed process. ;))
Hey, RD. It is also common practice to collect background. Which I did not from employers. The opinions of scholars are more reliable. An employer, obviously, has skin in the game.
There are articles linked within the piece, including to the NYT, which decry the predictive ability of job interviews, both formal and informal.
Dear Helen,
Thank you for your reply. I realise that you are paid to write and not to argue with punters, and that you work very hard. While I don’t expect a long debate on this, I hope that my response may clarify some key issues and either assist you or help readers in working things through, or both.
I have no disagreement with any conclusion quoted from the articles you cited. I loved that you cited academic articles. I didn’t read them, but took and take them on faith.
My contention is that the generalised conclusion you drew is not supportable from the limited research you did. In particular, I think you failed to validate your thesis (more on that in a moment), and over-generalised your inferences. (I’ll pick that first as I think it’ll make immediate sense to you.)
Interviews by themselves are not sufficient to qualify good candidate performance for many jobs. Therefore, interviews alone are an unreliable tool.
However, they may remain a necessary tool in the hiring arsenal because:
a) Failing key elements of an interview can be a good predictor of poor job performance. No examples should be needed here, but if you doubt it, please visit any cafe, service station or convenience store near you and ask a manager whether there are qualities or behaviours that would disqualify a candidate immediately;
b) As I’ve mentioned, it’s not just about the employer’s needs. It is also about answering candidate questions and presenting the opportunity to the candidate in more detail;
c) Finally, an interview is an excellent way to begin to establish personal and professional respect and trust between employer and employee: a factor desirable in all employment, and essential in some. (That’s not to say it always occurs, but it’s a good way to proceed.)
I understand you might think employers are too biased and ignorant to consult, but there are three problems with that:
1. They’re the natural target audience for your article, so you’ve just disrespected the people likely to be most interested in your views;
2. Employers face the consequences of their hiring failure directly just as you do as a journalist in your writing. So even well-intended errors come back to smack them pretty quickly, and like journalists they have the capacity to learn;
3. You haven’t the qualifications or experience yourself to dismiss employer experience as being less reliable than your preferred selection of academic papers. As a journalist you need to exercise the ability to recognise what you don’t know. The assumption that the writer herself may not know everything has a lot to do with why reporting ought to be balanced with diligent research. Whenever a journalist fails to do that, it risks becoming what another reader recently called ‘feelpinion’, and which Colbert famously called ‘truthiness’: ignorant pronouncements based on facts cherry-picked by emotion, misleading to readers and damaging to the profession in the medium to longer term.
This leads to a topic that I think will recur in my comments from time to time, since I believe it’s a critical failure in modern journalism and core to the problem journalists now like to call ‘post-truth’.
It’s the problem of validation: one of two planks fundamental to a modern understanding of knowledge — the other being verification.
Verification, journalists understand: they corroborate sources and this provides assurance of facts. I acknowledge that you did this on the questions you asked. You’re very strong on that, as are all regular Crikey contributors.
However validation is testing whether we’ve asked the right questions in the first place. Are we using the right tools to solve the stated problem?
This is especially important when we formulate a conjecture, hypothesis or advice. The classic validation question is: If I were wrong or ill-targeted in my knowledge, how would I know?
Validation generally works by making a specific, significant, time-bounded and independently-verifiable prediction that if failed, would falsify our claim to knowledge. This is what science philosopher Karl Popper called ‘falsification’, and it’s key in distinguishing between wild fiction, received wisdom and truth.
For example:
‘If I’m wrong about the benefits of job interviews then a significant proportion of experienced, competent, successful employers well-regarded by their staff would be able to explain lucidly why interviews are a critical part of their hiring process.’
Or:
‘If I’m wrong about the benefits of job interviews being only for the employer then a significant number of well-educated job-seekers will defend them as critical in how they select employers and negotiate their employment contracts.’
Or if you don’t know how to validate your own understanding because the domain is unfamiliar and too theoretical, then you could talk to people with more experience, and have them suggest to you how you’d know if you were wrong.
Some of the most robust and useful falsification criteria are supplied by people with different opinions to our own. Falsification is a good discipline in critical thought, even when we believe we know a subject well.
I hope this may be useful.
Ruv Honey, could you please ensure your comments are a bit longer….they’re too short.
Dear I, Venial Mess,
Sugar-cakes, if I’ve disappointed you, I hereby commit to reimburse you any money you paid me to read my conversation with someone else.
Love,
Teh Ruvvage.
There has been good evidence for yonks that the recruitment interview is a lousy predicts of job performance.
predictor
What intrigues me about this discussion is what is not said – namely how should an organisation recruit people if job interviews are so bad? Just toss a coin? Given an organisation has to take legal responsibility for the acts of its employees and can only offset this to a degree with insurance, there needs to be a defensible process for employing people.
Small businesses in particular find it hard to bring any expertise to recruitment. The result is that it is often easier to go with people who are known or recommended by people they trust. Anything public leads to too many applicants. That is why fronting small businesses in person and doing a sell to the owner can be a quite effective way of finding work in some parts of the economy.
In larger organisations there is often a problem of wanting people who will ‘fit in’ – which is code for ‘more people like us’. This can be frustrating if you happen to be on a panel and are actually looking for someone who can do the job best.
I suspect interviewing has become even harder these days, as social media has taught more and more people to curate the way they present themselves to the world. Just look at what people say about themselves on LinkedIn! So if you are interviewing people you have to assume the CVs are padded, the work samples are dubious (I really only wrote the third paragraph on page 7), and people are selling themselves like crazy (which makes absolute sense from their point of view).
Obviously any interview will depend on the nature of the job, but in my experience it is best to go for something tangible that relates to the person. That could be demonstrating a skill – technical or intellectual. One I liked to use was to pose a problem relevant to the nature of the work, and ask people how they would approach dealing with it. There was no right answer – it was simply about demonstrating an ability to think through a problem rather than regurgitate learned responses.
The other thing for me is to be honest about a job. In particular about the emotional aspects of it. For example – people will give you a hard time in this job because they don’t like … whatever.
This is particularly so for call centre work, where people have little idea of what they are going to encounter. One example is a call centre for a finance company that had staff call people to arrange repossession of cars. This was described as pretty heart rending if you had any empathy given the circumstances some of the people on the receiving end found themselves in. Call centre recruitment at the poor quality end seems to work on the basis of: group interview to weed out anyone obviously completely crazy, employ the rest, and assume half will leave within the week and 90%+ within a month. Not a positive approach.
So, in summary – yeah, job interviews can be pretty shit. So what is your alternative?
Peter wrote: job interviews can be pretty shit. So what is your alternative?
One of my clients recently asked for help in applying for a job outside the roles he has previously held. I was glad to help, and presented to him a way of thinking about interviews he found useful that he’d never considered before — and he’s over sixty.
The way most people I know think about job interviews is like a trial: they’re under examination; any element of their life can be questioned; the interviewer has absolute power, takes all the initiative and they’re simply reacting, trying to survive with their dignity and credibility intact.
That kind of hell is as bad as what most people experience in public speaking. Nobody should have to go through that!
But what if that wasn’t the right way to engage a job interview? What if most employers didn’t even want you to engage that way?
Referees. Talk to them.
Yes, but don’t necessarily believe them. The least reliable referees I have encountered were in the public service, where people would lie their heads off to try and pass someone who was a problem onto the next location – generally because they were not prepared to take action against the ‘troublemaker’.