Biases in the workplace are hardly news to anyone at this point. People make snap judgments and have instances of internal prejudices every single day. Could over-the-phone or message interviews be an effective tool for eliminating these biases?
Most of the in-person interviews that I have had have left me very unsure how I did. Was my body language correct? Was I wearing the right clothes? Is any of these relevant to the work that I would do, did it matter? A myriad of factors could have influenced what the interviewer thought about me, but how many of them were actually relevant to the work I was being interviewed for?
When I was interviewed for my position at a local mill in Roseburg, I had a structured interview conducted by a board of four members. I think that the company did an excellent job interviewing me, and I will now address the things I think they did right. I entered the room and each other them asked me a series of questions, some relevant, and some not. I was also asked to provide many STAR style responses to questions related to safety and ethics. I thought that the team was very effective in asking me the right questions. They were writing all of my responses down on the questions sheet, and this gave me the impression that they were going to compare my answers with those of other applicants horizontally. This structured interview style can be incredibly effective as it “allows different evaluators to reach similar judgments on a candidate” (2013).
There were, however a few things that I wish the company had done differently. I think that the interviewers asked too many questions that weren’t relevant to the work, and didn’t disclose many facets of the job that I was soon going to be started. I think that this was because these people had never seen the job being done, and had an inaccurate picture of the job in their head. If I were to go back and give those interviewers more advise I would tell them to refamiliarize themselves with the actual position that I was interviewing for and eliminate questions that are unrelated to the job to cut down on time (I was interviewed for two hours).
Chamorro-Premuzic, T., & Steinmetz, C. (2013). The Perfect Hire. Scientific American Mind, 24(3), 42–47. https://doi-org.ezproxy.proxy.library.oregonstate.edu/10.1038/scientificamericanmind0713-42
