4 ms·

Poor Predictors: Job Interviews Are Useless and Unfair

33 points by udev4096 3y ago

EhsanEtezad 3y ago
I am doing my PhD in Organizational Psychology so let me add here: The title is misleading a bit. The predictor power of an interview changes as a company gets better at doing interviews. What do I mean by getting better? (1) Asking the same questions (2) Having a BARS scale for scoring, which means you define the characteristics of a good response versus bad response before interviewing anyone (3) Interviewers received training to do this job impartially (4) Everyone on the interview panel agrees they don't make decisions just based on gut feeling! or saying I have a good feeling about this person! To summarize, Interview is okay if it's done correctly - It's not great though but not doing interviews have its problems/biases too :)
- Ajay-p 3y ago
  "Interview is okay if it's done correctly" IMHO and experience, it is rarely, if ever, done correctly. Most of the interview process now is a popularity contest, including how attractive you are, whether or not the team likes you, if you're physically fit, and a bread basket of other criteria that has very little to do with the actual job. And if you have a disability, it can be a dehumanizing and discriminatory process. It reminds me of orchestra selection, and how separating judgement of personal traits of a person (age, race, gender, etc.) from the "interview" process led to more diverse people selected for the orchestra. Would it be better to move the interview process away from the team and the managers involved, and instead have a separate department do all of the interviewing and hiring? I think that could cut down on the popularity poisoning, but maybe also give people who have a disability but otherwise excellent skill set, a chance. https://jamesboldin.com/2011/07/27/malcolm-gladwells-blink-part-2-listening-with-your-eyes/ https://jamesboldin.com/2011/07/27/malcolm-gladwells-blink-p...
  - scarface_74 3y ago
    No. I have specific behavioral and technical traits I’m looking for when building a team. I want to be able to do the interviews
  - usrusr 3y ago
    Popularity contest can be very rational though, when unpopular candidates that are winning in other metrics lead to your existing team looking elsewhere. Or worse: only the subset of your existing team that easily finds other employment.
  - Propelloni 3y ago
    That's how large corporations in non-knowledge work areas used to hire for decades. For knowledge work the results were not great, hence the new approach. It doesn't seem to be perfect either, so let's iterate. I have no clue how...
  - theoldlove 3y ago
    Lots of the big tech companies do interviews with randos first and then do a “team match” round if the candidate passes. I don’t see how it helps with disabilities.
fuzzfactor 3y ago
What more appropriate technique could you want, when you need to screen for a position that is itself useless, in an unfair employment environment?
RajT88 3y ago
> The task is rendered even more difficult by the fact that most people lie in job interviews. Woah what? Seriously? Back when I was starting my career, I had an acquaintance tell me that "everyone lies" and to feel free to pad my resume, because "everyone does it" and if I didn't do it, then my overall impression will be discounted anyways down to below what my actual capabilities were. I always chalked that up to him being a sales guy, so of course he's going to lie cheat and steal his way to the top, and insist that everyone should do the same. When I have interviewed candidates, I can tell when someone has lied about something, because they can't talk through their process for doing the thing they claimed to have done. The details won't be there, and/or will be wrong. It's not common. I don't put stuff on my resume that I can't speak to. Things I don't remember that well, I remove - no point in putting down stale skills that you're going to get dinged on. On the other hand - Psychology Today as a source of such things has been known to post articles like this on topics which have been roundly debunked in the field. So this could also be one of those bad opeds.
- floor2 3y ago
  Seems like an obvious case of "shades of grey" vs a binary thing. Most people don't blatantly lie and claim they were the CEO of Apple. But does a random mid-level engineer at Apple slightly exaggerate their role on a team during an interview? Subjective, but likely very common. Plus, many jobs are almost intractable to appropriately assign value to. If you were one of 5 people pitching a deal to a company, and it works, who's to say which person was the key to success? All 5 people might truly believe that they were the reason the deal closed and take credit for it in future interviews.
  - RajT88 3y ago
    This is apparently what was cited. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.0021-9029.2006.00055.x https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.0021-9029.... Interesting stuff.
- Nasrudith 3y ago
  I have taken a course in interviewing when I was trying to get jobs. The techniques presented were all but asking to be deceived as all of the signs of trustworthiness had nothing to do with actual trustworthiness and had to do with playing them off, subtle mirroring of mannerisms, and similar. When you start asking for things that like or things that people can't truly control like "enthusiasm" or "confidence" regardless of your stated intents what you are really selecting for is bullshitters, as natural chance of a match up is the distant competitor
jowdones 3y ago
And not interviewing is worse than useless and extremely unfair.
- Nasrudith 3y ago
  Isn't much of the unfairness just because most not-interview recruitment they skip it in favor of people who they know through connections? How would interviewing be less fair than say, using a civil service exam or similar?
_aavaa_ 3y ago
Title is clickbait. Tldr of the article: don't do unstructured interviews, do structured ones.
paulpauper 3y ago
Companies invest so much time and resources in screening because the of a suboptimal or unqualified employee is far greater than the benefit of a good employee. A poor fit employee is a major drag.
- Rinzler89 3y ago
  Sorry no, that's why you have a trial/probation period even in Europe, ranging from a month to a couple of years when you can fire them without any cause or severance. It's precisely so you can gauge their performance on the job without any risk to the employer. So what's the issue here? But companies are being needlessly pedantic about only wanting to hire "the best of the best" and nothing else will suffice as if they're all working on problems the scale of Google or Astra Zeneca. Here's a recent article saying that "EU jobs crisis as employers say applicants don't have the right skills"[1]. Well then, train them or be more flexible since people can also learn and train themselves if you give them the chance. No candidate will have 100% math to the skills you want. [1] https://www.euronews.com/business/2024/04/08/eu-jobs-crisis-as-employers-say-applicants-dont-have-the-right-skills https://www.euronews.com/business/2024/04/08/eu-jobs-crisis-...
  - noah91734 3y ago
    This would be great. It's odd to me that we in the US get the worst of both worlds: despite at-will employment laws and almost no employment contracts, it's difficult to get hired because companies are so afraid of bad hires, and companies don't exercise their right to fire people who don't work out. We hire like it's hard to fire people!
    - Rinzler89 3y ago
      >We hire like it's hard to fire people! I think you're quite mistaken here. Come to Europe and see, the job market is basically frozen, while people on HN say in the US they have so many jobs options right now that they can be picky about only choosing the ones with 100% WFH, while here I can't even get replies to jobs demanding commute to the office every day. You don't know how good you have it over there.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
kraftman 3y ago
Out of interest, do any companies review the people they have hired 6/12 months later vs how they did on the interview?
ARandomerDude 3y ago
Interviewing is important. That said, I've worked at small companies (4 people) and large ones (30K+ people), and in my experience the overwhelming majority of candidates can be screened effectively by going through their resume with them and asking them simple questions, like: 1. What was the problem you were trying to solve? Why did you solve it this way? 2. If you were the decision maker, why did you choose this technology stack? 3. I see you have a lot of Python/Java/... experience. What do you like and dislike about about Python/Java/...? No need to get into your hobbies and how you would invert a binary tree. Generally, neither of those are relevant questions. Unless you're at FAANG and there is a line of amazingly qualified candidates out the door and around the corner, the above will effectively screen for competent software developers, assuming the interviewer is technically competent.
- inurely 3y ago
  > No need to get into your hobbies I know you are trying to be 'one of the good ones' by saying this, but my hobbies are significantly more interesting and reflective of my ability than the work I did collecting a paycheck by appeasing the frontend framework gods for some crapp that is long dead now. And the people in charge of hiring with this "resume first" mentality will likely keep it that way. Why does "previous employment" even play into the calculation of how my collaboration will help you achieve your goals?
  - pan69 3y ago
    If you think that your hobbies are a significant contributor to the role you are applying for, put it on your resume. I'm sure that OP meant discussing things that are not directly on your resume or are tangibly related to the application/role and don't have any real merit in being discussed and/or add any real value in being discussed as most people's hobbies have nothing or little to do with their professional life.
- kagakuninja 3y ago
  As the article points out, we think we are making rational decisions, when in fact we are heavily influenced by subconscious biases. In particular, we favor people we like. That gives an edge to candidates that are friendly and attractive. Since I am an introvert and on the autistic spectrum, traditional interviews are an uphill battle. Even reasonable ones like you describe.
koube 3y ago
I always hear job interviews are useless but do people really stand by that? If you had an interviewee with a bad interview and one with a good interview, you would feel confident hiring the one with the bad interview? If someone refused to interview, would you hire them because of their refusal like the article recommends? I don't know a single real life person that would consider this a good idea. This seems like a strange virtue signaling if people are going on the internet saying things and then doing the opposite.
jarjoura 3y ago
No matter the structure of the interview, it will always come down to things we cannot control in the end. 1. You will have shit days and your brain will actively work against you, no matter how qualified you are for the job. If your interview happens to be on that day, well, it's just unfortunate. 2. Your interviewer also has shit days that actively work against them, no matter how many interviews they've given in the past to calibrate their expectations. If your interview happens to be on that day, well, just the one tiny slip-up, or mistake, or forgetting one simple test case, could mean they wrote you off, no matter how strong the rest of your interview went. When they leave feedback, it will frame your other interviews too. So yea, that's just unfortunate. 3. You were 1 day behind another candidate, who was interviewed and loved, after the company spent weeks searching for them. No matter how amazing you do, even hitting it out of the park, they likely already know they want the other person, and you are being interviewed as the backup should they reject the offer. All we can do, is keep at it, practice interviewing, keep studying and try to sleep well the night before. We can clean up our appearances too, looking like we care to be here. There's definitely a difference between someone who walks into an interview, looking smug and uninterested, versus someone passionate about the role and excited to be part of the mission of the company. Those are the things we can control. Hopefully, with enough preparation, luck and timing, you get the job.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
gosub100 3y ago
Nobody has mentioned ATS yet. For one, it's totally opaque to the applicants. Second, it's an egregious from of discrimination for the sole purpose of laziness. If a company won't even look at your resume if it's missing some silly programs. It eliminates all critical thinking and causes non traditional background applicants to be ignored. Not to mention that whoever sets the ATS rules could share them with select people to give unfair advantage.
jacknews 3y ago
"In ten years, I see myself living in a world without job interviews." lol, not gonna happen.

33 points by udev4096 3y ago

I am doing my PhD in Organizational Psychology so let me add here: The title is misleading a bit. The predictor power of an interview changes as a company gets better at doing interviews. What do I mean by getting better? (1) Asking the same questions (2) Having a BARS scale for scoring, which means you define the characteristics of a good response versus bad response before interviewing anyone (3) Interviewers received training to do this job impartially (4) Everyone on the interview panel agrees they don't make decisions just based on gut feeling! or saying I have a good feeling about this person! To summarize, Interview is okay if it's done correctly - It's not great though but not doing interviews have its problems/biases too :)

Ajay-p 3y ago
"Interview is okay if it's done correctly" IMHO and experience, it is rarely, if ever, done correctly. Most of the interview process now is a popularity contest, including how attractive you are, whether or not the team likes you, if you're physically fit, and a bread basket of other criteria that has very little to do with the actual job. And if you have a disability, it can be a dehumanizing and discriminatory process. It reminds me of orchestra selection, and how separating judgement of personal traits of a person (age, race, gender, etc.) from the "interview" process led to more diverse people selected for the orchestra. Would it be better to move the interview process away from the team and the managers involved, and instead have a separate department do all of the interviewing and hiring? I think that could cut down on the popularity poisoning, but maybe also give people who have a disability but otherwise excellent skill set, a chance. https://jamesboldin.com/2011/07/27/malcolm-gladwells-blink-part-2-listening-with-your-eyes/ https://jamesboldin.com/2011/07/27/malcolm-gladwells-blink-p...
- scarface_74 3y ago
  No. I have specific behavioral and technical traits I’m looking for when building a team. I want to be able to do the interviews
- usrusr 3y ago
  Popularity contest can be very rational though, when unpopular candidates that are winning in other metrics lead to your existing team looking elsewhere. Or worse: only the subset of your existing team that easily finds other employment.
- Propelloni 3y ago
  That's how large corporations in non-knowledge work areas used to hire for decades. For knowledge work the results were not great, hence the new approach. It doesn't seem to be perfect either, so let's iterate. I have no clue how...
- theoldlove 3y ago
  Lots of the big tech companies do interviews with randos first and then do a “team match” round if the candidate passes. I don’t see how it helps with disabilities.

fuzzfactor 3y ago

What more appropriate technique could you want, when you need to screen for a position that is itself useless, in an unfair employment environment?

RajT88 3y ago

> The task is rendered even more difficult by the fact that most people lie in job interviews. Woah what? Seriously? Back when I was starting my career, I had an acquaintance tell me that "everyone lies" and to feel free to pad my resume, because "everyone does it" and if I didn't do it, then my overall impression will be discounted anyways down to below what my actual capabilities were. I always chalked that up to him being a sales guy, so of course he's going to lie cheat and steal his way to the top, and insist that everyone should do the same. When I have interviewed candidates, I can tell when someone has lied about something, because they can't talk through their process for doing the thing they claimed to have done. The details won't be there, and/or will be wrong. It's not common. I don't put stuff on my resume that I can't speak to. Things I don't remember that well, I remove - no point in putting down stale skills that you're going to get dinged on. On the other hand - Psychology Today as a source of such things has been known to post articles like this on topics which have been roundly debunked in the field. So this could also be one of those bad opeds.

floor2 3y ago
Seems like an obvious case of "shades of grey" vs a binary thing. Most people don't blatantly lie and claim they were the CEO of Apple. But does a random mid-level engineer at Apple slightly exaggerate their role on a team during an interview? Subjective, but likely very common. Plus, many jobs are almost intractable to appropriately assign value to. If you were one of 5 people pitching a deal to a company, and it works, who's to say which person was the key to success? All 5 people might truly believe that they were the reason the deal closed and take credit for it in future interviews.
- RajT88 3y ago
  This is apparently what was cited. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.0021-9029.2006.00055.x https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.0021-9029.... Interesting stuff.
Nasrudith 3y ago
I have taken a course in interviewing when I was trying to get jobs. The techniques presented were all but asking to be deceived as all of the signs of trustworthiness had nothing to do with actual trustworthiness and had to do with playing them off, subtle mirroring of mannerisms, and similar. When you start asking for things that like or things that people can't truly control like "enthusiasm" or "confidence" regardless of your stated intents what you are really selecting for is bullshitters, as natural chance of a match up is the distant competitor

jowdones 3y ago

And not interviewing is worse than useless and extremely unfair.

Nasrudith 3y ago
Isn't much of the unfairness just because most not-interview recruitment they skip it in favor of people who they know through connections? How would interviewing be less fair than say, using a civil service exam or similar?

_aavaa_ 3y ago

Title is clickbait. Tldr of the article: don't do unstructured interviews, do structured ones.

paulpauper 3y ago

Companies invest so much time and resources in screening because the of a suboptimal or unqualified employee is far greater than the benefit of a good employee. A poor fit employee is a major drag.

Rinzler89 3y ago
Sorry no, that's why you have a trial/probation period even in Europe, ranging from a month to a couple of years when you can fire them without any cause or severance. It's precisely so you can gauge their performance on the job without any risk to the employer. So what's the issue here? But companies are being needlessly pedantic about only wanting to hire "the best of the best" and nothing else will suffice as if they're all working on problems the scale of Google or Astra Zeneca. Here's a recent article saying that "EU jobs crisis as employers say applicants don't have the right skills"[1]. Well then, train them or be more flexible since people can also learn and train themselves if you give them the chance. No candidate will have 100% math to the skills you want. [1] https://www.euronews.com/business/2024/04/08/eu-jobs-crisis-as-employers-say-applicants-dont-have-the-right-skills https://www.euronews.com/business/2024/04/08/eu-jobs-crisis-...
- noah91734 3y ago
  This would be great. It's odd to me that we in the US get the worst of both worlds: despite at-will employment laws and almost no employment contracts, it's difficult to get hired because companies are so afraid of bad hires, and companies don't exercise their right to fire people who don't work out. We hire like it's hard to fire people!
  - Rinzler89 3y ago
    >We hire like it's hard to fire people! I think you're quite mistaken here. Come to Europe and see, the job market is basically frozen, while people on HN say in the US they have so many jobs options right now that they can be picky about only choosing the ones with 100% WFH, while here I can't even get replies to jobs demanding commute to the office every day. You don't know how good you have it over there.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

kraftman 3y ago

Out of interest, do any companies review the people they have hired 6/12 months later vs how they did on the interview?

ARandomerDude 3y ago

Interviewing is important. That said, I've worked at small companies (4 people) and large ones (30K+ people), and in my experience the overwhelming majority of candidates can be screened effectively by going through their resume with them and asking them simple questions, like: 1. What was the problem you were trying to solve? Why did you solve it this way? 2. If you were the decision maker, why did you choose this technology stack? 3. I see you have a lot of Python/Java/... experience. What do you like and dislike about about Python/Java/...? No need to get into your hobbies and how you would invert a binary tree. Generally, neither of those are relevant questions. Unless you're at FAANG and there is a line of amazingly qualified candidates out the door and around the corner, the above will effectively screen for competent software developers, assuming the interviewer is technically competent.

inurely 3y ago
> No need to get into your hobbies I know you are trying to be 'one of the good ones' by saying this, but my hobbies are significantly more interesting and reflective of my ability than the work I did collecting a paycheck by appeasing the frontend framework gods for some crapp that is long dead now. And the people in charge of hiring with this "resume first" mentality will likely keep it that way. Why does "previous employment" even play into the calculation of how my collaboration will help you achieve your goals?
- pan69 3y ago
  If you think that your hobbies are a significant contributor to the role you are applying for, put it on your resume. I'm sure that OP meant discussing things that are not directly on your resume or are tangibly related to the application/role and don't have any real merit in being discussed and/or add any real value in being discussed as most people's hobbies have nothing or little to do with their professional life.
kagakuninja 3y ago
As the article points out, we think we are making rational decisions, when in fact we are heavily influenced by subconscious biases. In particular, we favor people we like. That gives an edge to candidates that are friendly and attractive. Since I am an introvert and on the autistic spectrum, traditional interviews are an uphill battle. Even reasonable ones like you describe.

koube 3y ago

I always hear job interviews are useless but do people really stand by that? If you had an interviewee with a bad interview and one with a good interview, you would feel confident hiring the one with the bad interview? If someone refused to interview, would you hire them because of their refusal like the article recommends? I don't know a single real life person that would consider this a good idea. This seems like a strange virtue signaling if people are going on the internet saying things and then doing the opposite.

jarjoura 3y ago

No matter the structure of the interview, it will always come down to things we cannot control in the end. 1. You will have shit days and your brain will actively work against you, no matter how qualified you are for the job. If your interview happens to be on that day, well, it's just unfortunate. 2. Your interviewer also has shit days that actively work against them, no matter how many interviews they've given in the past to calibrate their expectations. If your interview happens to be on that day, well, just the one tiny slip-up, or mistake, or forgetting one simple test case, could mean they wrote you off, no matter how strong the rest of your interview went. When they leave feedback, it will frame your other interviews too. So yea, that's just unfortunate. 3. You were 1 day behind another candidate, who was interviewed and loved, after the company spent weeks searching for them. No matter how amazing you do, even hitting it out of the park, they likely already know they want the other person, and you are being interviewed as the backup should they reject the offer. All we can do, is keep at it, practice interviewing, keep studying and try to sleep well the night before. We can clean up our appearances too, looking like we care to be here. There's definitely a difference between someone who walks into an interview, looking smug and uninterested, versus someone passionate about the role and excited to be part of the mission of the company. Those are the things we can control. Hopefully, with enough preparation, luck and timing, you get the job.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

gosub100 3y ago

Nobody has mentioned ATS yet. For one, it's totally opaque to the applicants. Second, it's an egregious from of discrimination for the sole purpose of laziness. If a company won't even look at your resume if it's missing some silly programs. It eliminates all critical thinking and causes non traditional background applicants to be ignored. Not to mention that whoever sets the ATS rules could share them with select people to give unfair advantage.

jacknews 3y ago

"In ten years, I see myself living in a world without job interviews." lol, not gonna happen.