People seek interviews with their bank manager or their doctor, they are interviewed for a job or for promotion, and at work they may have an annual 'appraisal interview'. Some are interviewed as they apply for Social Security or other benefits, and others may be interviewed by a journalist or a market researcher.
These different encounters all have as defining characteristics a certain formality and an asymmetry. Participants' roles are specified, in that one person is the interviewer and the other is the interviewee (although in practice more than two people may be involved) and each has a fairly clear idea of the type of behaviour which is expected. The objective is for the interviewer to obtain and interpret information from the interviewee in order to make a decision or take some action.
Let us look particularly at interviews in personnel selection, where an official of an organization has to decide which candidate to select for a job from among a number of applicants. Such interviews are often criticized on the grounds that different interviewers can reach different conclusions about the same candidate, and a number of experiments have examined the ways in which interviewers can be 'calibrated' so that they reliably form similar impressions. One approach has varied the degree of structure imposed upon the interview, in terms of the requirement to obtain certain kinds of information and to draw inferences only about pre-specified attributes or likely behaviours. Results indicate that increased structure yields significantly greater uniformity between interviewers. Similar outcomes can be achieved through training schemes which aim to make interviewers aware of possible biases and which stress the need to identify goals and important issues in advance. For example, the 'seven-point plan' encourages interviewers to define job requirements carefully and to obtain information about candidates in terms of physique, intelligence, aptitude, attainments, interests, disposition, and circumstances.
Although reliability can be enhanced in these ways, there remains the question whether interviewers can validly predict subsequent work behaviour. A major research problem is the difficulty of establishing acceptable measures of 'good' or 'bad' behaviour in an occupational role. Limited measures of skilled performance or of output levels may be available for some manual jobs, but professional and managerial work is much less open to quantification, and it is in those areas that interviews are particularly widespread. This problem, of adequately measuring the behaviour we wish to predict, is endemic in all areas of personnel selection, and is often referred to as 'the criterion problem'.
However, despite the commonly expressed doubts, selection interviews are here to stay, if for no other reason than that they provide an opportunity for the candidate to ask his own questions and to reach his own conclusions about a potential employer. The interpersonal processes at work during an interview are subtle, complex, and fascinating. Consider the ways in which an interviewer will search for and integrate information about the applicant. Research has established clearly that people form impressions of each other through the application of previously established expectancies or 'inference rules'. Evidence that a person has a certain characteristic (anxiousness in the interview situation, for example) sets up a network of inferences about other characteristics. These networks are sometimes referred to as 'implicit theories of personality', and perceivers apply their own implicit theories to even the most limited pieces of evidence. Indeed, some people take pride in 'summing him up as soon as he comes through the door', whereas others may devote their energies to fighting a similar form of stereotyped perception, where extensive inferences are drawn from single cues such as 'black', 'female', or 'handicapped'. In general terms, manifested features have been found to make their greatest impact during short encounters, when other evidence is meagre. Thus many perceivers initially take the wearing of spectacles to imply intelligence and thoughtfulness (see
halo effect). Conventional wisdom has it that 'first impressions count', and research has looked in detail at this question. It seems that the initial impression is tested through subsequent investigation. However, there is often a predisposition in an interviewer to obtain
negative information, material which suggests that the candidate should not be selected. This is understandable in the light of the interviewer's regular need to reject most of the applicants, but it is important for the 'first impressions count' thesis. This needs to be refined to suggest that an early negative impression is readily reached and is difficult to change, whereas an early positive impression is less easily made and is liable to be overridden if negative evidence becomes available subsequently.
One interesting research finding bears upon this issue. There is typically a significant positive correlation between the proportion of time during which the
interviewer talks and the probability that a candidate will be offered the job. This may be interpreted in terms of an early implicit decision by an interviewer which tends to make later questioning redundant and perhaps suggests that the desirable candidate should be encouraged through conversation to maintain his interest in the vacancy.
The skills of interviewing extend to coordinating the interaction through verbal and non-verbal cues at the same time as gaining and integrating a variety of items of information. Recent research has placed emphasis on the non-verbal cues which contribute to impression formation and management: they may be relatively unchanging — as with general appearance, clothes,
facial expression, and so on — or they may be dynamic — as in
eye contact, bodily movements, or loudness of speech.
How can people learn to be good interviewers? We all have relevant experience, talking with and acquiring information from others, and there is a tendency to feel that we are quite competent. But experience without detailed feedback is often of limited value: we need to learn with some precision about the effects of our actions and impressions so that we can improve upon them. This requirement has been the basis of recent experiments in interviewer training, and powerful procedures are now available. These have as their core the use of feedback about performance, often through the replay of videotaped practice sessions. In this way, trainees are able to chart and improve their performance over a series of practice interviews, assisted both by their tutors and by their fellow trainees. Behaviour category systems are often applied to generate profiles of an interviewer's style in a way that points up strong and weak points, providing in a striking manner the feedback that is necessary for learning.
(Published 1987)— Peter B. Warr
Bibliography- Anstey, E. (1977). An Introduction to Selection Interviewing.
- Argyle, M. (1973). Social Encounters: Readings in Social Interaction.
- Mackensie D. D., and McDonnell, P. (1975). How to Interview.
- Sidney, E., Brown, M., and Argyle, M. (1973). Skills with People: A Guide for Managers.
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