Improving Interview Effectiveness

In my experience with interviewing, looking back on them I have had fairly ineffective interviews. This is because the interviewer developed an unstructured interview for me each time. Unstructured interviews are something I would suggest my past interviewers to stray away from. Unstructured interviews have been found to be among the WORST predictors of actual on-the-job performance. Also, unstructured interviews increase the likelihood of bias and irrelevant information. Instead, I would suggest interviewers to conduct structured interviews where behavioral or situational questions are asked. These types of questions relate more to job-performance and how one may handle tasks or problems on the job. Questions that are not job-related are questions you want to avoid because they lack usefulness.

Furthermore, in my past interviews my ability was never tested. However, ability tests can be a great way to improve interview effectiveness. An ability test I strongly suggest to my past interviewers to add to their interviews, is to test cognitive ability. This measures a person’s ability to generally think about information and ideas. Google’s number one thing they look for in interviews is an individual’s cognitive ability, so I would strongly suggest this to become a part of interviews more often.

Overall, we must replace unstructured interviews with structured interviews. It is also useful to not only develop interview questions prior to the interview, but also benchmark answers. This helps minimize risk of bias, helps avoid disagreements between interviewers, and makes future hiring processes more efficient. Lastly, I would like to stress the importance of post-interview activity. After the interview, you must review and expand on the notes you took; I would even suggest scoring the candidate’s answers through the notes you gathered.

Bohnet, Iris. “How to Take the Bias out of Interviews.” Harvard Business Review, 18 July 2016, https://hbr.org/2016/04/how-to-take-the-bias-out-of-interviews.

“Human Resources Management.” Week 5 Learning Materials, Canvas, https://canvas.oregonstate.edu/courses/1940354/pages/week-5-learning-materials?module_item_id=23034551.

Robertson, Mitchell, and Mitchell Robertson Mitchell Robertson brings over 20 years of experience in industries that span nonprofit. “5 Qualities Google Looks for in New Hires.” Code Fellows, 1 Mar. 2014, https://www.codefellows.org/blog/5-traits-google-looks-for-in-new-hires/.