Throughout college I have had five separate interview experiences with different companies. The first interview I ever completed was in my sophomore year of college. I remember this interview to be ineffective when thinking about reliability, validity, and utility. To begin, this interview only had one person sitting in asking questions one-on-one. It was early as well which made it seem rushed because he had a full day ahead of himself. According to the lecture notes, an interview with one person conducting it can have lower reliability (single person perception), snap judgements, possibility to bias, and could risk accuracy in assessing a person’s qualifications. Even though I didn’t pick this up much during the interview, one thing I struggled with was my first question being, “how would you feel about working in Alaska?” It ended up catching me off guard and felt that without fully committing to a yes hindered the rest of my interview process with him. Ultimately this showed me how an interview with only one person could produce some bias and be an ineffective use of time.
The remaining interviews I had, involved multiple interviewers from different parts of the company (human resources, project managers, project engineers, etc.). In my personal experience these interviews went well because multiple people meant questions from all around. It helped get more information on the table during our discussion and didn’t allow time for silence in between questions. Personally, this felt better because pace of interview felt better and that information could be interpreted from multiple people. Based on the lecture notes, interviews with multiple people can improve reliability (more than one person evaluates the candidate), reduce individual bias, allow multiple perspectives about the candidate, and improves accuracy for hiring the correct candidate. Ultimately, I felt that interviews with more people was more effective than one and helped the accuracy for recruiting.
Going back in these interviews I would ask for them to always include people from multiple departments as it can produce questions from all around and give the candidate a better way to present themselves fully and share who they are as a person.