Job Interviews Are Broken. There’s a Way to Fix Them.

APS Member/Author: Adam Grant

Within the first few minutes of the interview, I knew the candidate was a bad fit for a sales position. His résumé had tipped me off: He was a math major and built robots in his spare time. Now we were sitting face-to-face in my office, but he hardly made any eye contact. When I told my boss I wasn’t going to hire him because of that, she said, “You know this is a phone sales job, right?”

For decades, managers have bet on the wrong people — and rejected the right ones. The Kansas City Star once rejected an application from a cartoonist named Walt Disney. Record labels said no thanks to the Beatles, Madonna, U2, Kanye and Ed Sheeran. A hotel, a police department and a Kentucky Fried Chicken all denied Jack Ma a job. And 30 N.F.L. teams decided not to draft Tom Brady.

It doesn’t have to be that way. In organizational psychology, we have over a century of evidence on why job interviews fail and how to fix them. If managers learn to overcome three basic mistakes, they can get better at spotting diamonds in the rough.

The first mistake is asking the wrong kinds of questions. Some questions are just too easy to fake. What’s your greatest weakness? Even Michael Scott, the inept manager in the TV show “The Office,” aced that one: “I work too hard. I care too much.” Other questions reveal more about the manager who’s asking than the candidate who’s responding. How many paper clips would fit in Yankee Stadium? Brainteasers turn out to be useless for predicting job performance, but useful for identifying sadistic managers, who seem to enjoy stumping people.

We’re better off asking behavioral questions. Tell me about a time when …. Past behavior can help us anticipate future behavior. But sometimes they’re easy to game, especially for candidates with more experience. We can get around those issues by including some situational questions. What would you do if .… Pick a challenge that’s important for success in the job and your culture, and we can learn something valuable about how candidates will lead, handle conflicts and solve problems.

The second error is focusing on the wrong criteria. At banks and law firms, managers often favor people who went to the same school or share their love of lacrosse. Across industries and occupations, economists find that even when candidates’ résumé are identical, those with white-sounding names like Allison and Matthew get 50 percent more callbacks than those with African-American-sounding names like Lakisha and Jamal. There’s evidence that birthmarks, being pregnant and being overweight can put candidates at a disadvantage. And believe it or not, bald men are seen as having more leadership potential if they shave their heads (which is obviously why I shave my head).

We can overcome some of these biases with structured interviews: identifying the key skills and values in advance, and then creating a standard set of behavioral and situational questions to ask every candidate. Although it might sound boring and robotic, it can double or even triple managers’ accuracy in predicting job performance. We can even build an answer key by posing questions to our existing employees and seeing how star performers answer them differently.

This doesn’t solve a third problem. Job interviews favor the candidates who are the best talkers. When college seniors show up for interviews, over 90 percent stretch the truth to make a better impression and improve their odds of getting the job. I think Chris Rock put it best: “When you meet somebody for the first time, you’re not meeting them. You’re meeting their representative.”

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A work sample can also be a live simulation of the job in real-time. In orchestras, women finally got a fair chance when blind auditions were introduced. Suddenly, managers started making decisions based on the quality of music being played behind a curtain instead of the demographics of the person playing it. At General Electric, to identify aircraft engine mechanics who work well with others, managers dump a pile of LEGOs on the table and ask a half dozen candidates to work together to build a helicopter, and score their teamworking skills.

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Read the whole story (subscription may be required): The New York Times