Interviews are a key component of selecting employees that not only resonate with the company’s culture but also evaluate their skill sets in relation to the job opportunity. From personal experience, most of my interviews were for internship positions, so the extent of testing my abilities for the needed tasks at hand has been minimal. The interviews I have been a part of were unstructured and focused on how I was going to be a good cultural fit, my work ethic, my ability to work with others, and what I did in my free time. All of these are very important when it comes to determining whether to hire an individual or not, however, it could create a bias toward certain candidates. According to the article, “How to Take the Bias Out of Interviews” by Iris Bohnet, unstructured interviews provide minimal information about predicting the candidates’ actual on-the-job capabilities. The Pro of unstructured interviews is the company gets a better sense of the personality of the applicant, however, the Con is that a lack of information related to the ability of the applicant is collected. Another thing I experienced during my interviews was being asked yes or no questions in relation to job tasks, which doesn’t contribute to the reliability, validity, or utility of the interview procedure (Lecture 4: Improving Interview Effectiveness). This ultimately doesn’t give the employer any information about the critical thinking skills and or abilities of the applicant.
Something that could contribute to improving my past employers’ interview effectiveness is more emphasis on assessing my abilities for the tasks needed to be completed during employment. One way they would be able to do this would be by walking future candidates through hypothetical scenarios that are linked to past internal occurrences and assessing the way they would handle the scenario (Lecture 4: Improving Interview Effectiveness). By simply doing this, the reliability, validity, and utility of the interview as a whole increase, and also it gives the candidate the opportunity to prove their abilities/critical thinking skills.
Work Cited:
“How to Take the Bias out of Interviews.” Harvard Business Review, Iris Bohnet , 18 July 2016, https://hbr.org/2016/04/how-to-take-the-bias-out-of-interviews.
