In a recent Wired article, Google’s Senior VP of People Operations Laszlo Bock discussed how traditional interview techniques may not produce quality employees.
Bock cites a study conducted in 2000 by two psychology students at the University of Toldeo, which found that judgments made within the first 10 seconds of an interview could predict the outcome.
The interviewer will then spend the rest of the interview trying to confirm the 10-second impression of the potential employee.
He asserts that unstructured interviews are a waste of time, because they can only explain 14% of an employee’s performance.
The best predictor of how someone will perform in a job is a work sample test (29%), but not all jobs can be easily tested on paper.
Bock said: “The goal of our interview process is to predict how candidates will perform once they join the team. We achieve that goal by doing what the science says: combining behavioral and situational structured interviews with assessments of cognitive ability, conscientiousness, and leadership.”
Behavioral interviews might require candidates to describe prior achievements, and match those to what is required in the current job.
Alternatively, situational interviews present a candidate with a job-related hypothetical situation. Bock says that while these interview questions might appear to be bland, it’s all about the answers.
“Yes, these questions are bland; it’s the answers that are compelling. But the questions give you a consistent, reliable basis for sifting the superb candidates from the merely great, because superb candidates will have much, much better examples and reasons for making the choices they did,” said Bock.
For more information, check out the article on Wired.