The Good and The Bad of Interviews


I recently had an interview experience that was both effective and ineffective. It was effective because of the company’s reliability and selection utility, but ineffective because of their validity. Selection utility used well because the company sent two representatives to Oregon State’s career fair to select individuals who exemplified their values and might be a good fit for a post-graduation career. The cost of the administration was probably minimal to none because of them sending two employees to recruit a multitude of future employees that otherwise they could have missed out on. The company also showed a good use of reliability in their interview process. I know this because over the course of two days, a couple of my friends and I went through the process of meeting them at the career fair, then individually interviewing with them, and we each felt that we had the same experience. However in contrast to these positive points, the validity of the interviewing process was lacking because they did not utilize content validity and, in my opinion, relied too heavily on predictive validity. This was demonstrated by the interviewer not asking any questions about my work ethic, but rather just making casual conversation that did not bring out useful information about my potential job performance. I also noticed the predictive validity during the interview through the interviewer reading my resume and taking it for face value, assuming that if I had previously worked in a certain industry that I would be great for the job. From my perspective, this was great to hear, but there were never any follow up questions or clarification, just assuming and predicting that I would be a great fit. When looking at how to best improve the effectiveness of this company’s interviews, I would focus on the validity and suggest the topic of conversation to be more based on the job analysis and the interviewee’s qualities that could support them in  job performance that is needed.

References:

Swift, M. (2022, October). Selection. [PowerPoint slides]. 

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