We’re going through an interview process here, so I thought back to this previous post that I wrote about interviewing. I stand by most of what I said, but I have some further thoughts. Here’s what I wrote, oddly enough, almost a year ago to the day.
One of the articles that I’ve thought a lot about is the Malcolm Gladwell article about bias in interviewing. I certainly don’t want to chop his article down to small pieces, but the part that was most troubling to me was that the research he cites found that job interviewers opinions of a candidate within 5 seconds of meeting the candidate and after an hour of interviewing were essentially the same. That is, the actual interview had nothing to do with the opinion of the candidate but instead the thin slice of your perception within 5 seconds. This would be fine if we were experts at people, but while many of us would like to believe that we are, we are not.
At work here is the confirmation bias, the idea that people tend to accept information that confirms that which we already believe and to refuse all other information. It’s our brain at work and, while you can fight it, you cannot defeat it. It’s our brain’s way of filtering information. You immediately want to like or dislike the candidate, and you may not even know why. They may even just look like someone you’d met before and didn’t like for one reason or another (maybe an ex partner), but it doesn’t register. You just know immediately your feelings about this person. While the skill of being able to quickly decipher someone may be a positive in life or death situations (i’m vaguely paraphrasing “blink“), in an interview situation, it’s not positive at all. You’re trying to grasp a holistic view of the candidate and all you’re getting is a quick reaction to your initial meeting and that’s hardly a holistic view.
Some solutions were proposed by Twitter folks and while well meaning, they don’t necessarily remove the bias:
- competency based interviewing – asking the right questions does not preclude confirmation bias. while it may help to glean better information as a whole, it does not necessarily remove the “i like them” or “i don’t” bias. Also, how does an interview situation help you to learn anything about how good this candidate is at their job and how they “fit”? Have any of you been forced to sit around a table and be quizzed by 6 people other than your interview day? Yeah, thought not.
- references – this is on the right track, but there is a significant incentive to the referencer to not be completely honest about the candidate. It weeds out the truly bad apples, but doesn’t necessarily give you all the information you need. What if the situation they were in was a toxic one? Is the referencee a quality referencer (to put it bluntly, are they an incompetent and you just don’t realize it)? I think there’s an assumption that we “know” people when we’re in a professional association with them and I think that’s faulty.
I propose that the interview process should be flipped on it’s head.
I’m hoping to hire a candidate to do Job X. Why not bring them in to do Job X? For instance, you’re hiring a candidate to run a weekend program – bring them in for 3 days and tell them that their assignment is to create a weekend programming calendar for the next 2 months. Let students that they’ll be working with actually be advised by them on their programs (schedule their advising meetings for these 3 days). Run them through the ringer and forget this staged interview crap. These interviews don’t actually measure what you want to know!
Step 2. Instead of asking for a resume with a list of job responsibilities, give me some real actual metrics. I want references from students on what you’re about. I want event attendance numbers. I want demographic information. I want to see what you’ve done to materially improve the department and program you’ve worked with. I want to see where your impact was. Don’t give me a list of job responsibilities, I want to know what you did, how well you did and where your impact was. Don’t have it? Guess you didn’t want this job. Our job is not about dollars and cents (well, not all the time), but there are ways that you can materially show your impact.
Like I said previously, I stand by most of this.
As Teri Bump said in the comments on that post, I’m probably being unrealistic.
A year later, I stand by my thought that interviewing people around a table, or having them do a presentation is horribly inefficient for determining whether someone can actually do a job and do it well.
I don’t stand by my resume and cover letter suggestions completely. I’d change the following:
- I know that employers typically have a good idea of what they’re looking for in a candidate for a position, especially specific skills (someone in student affairs who’s raised grades in a greek system, for example). Employers need to be more specific about what they’re looking for in a candidate. If the candidate doesn’t specifically address your specific requests, they go in the trash.
- Candidates should be encouraged to only send resumes that highlight specific accomplishments that pertain to the specific job they’re applying for. We don’t need laundry lists of job responsibilities that would fit with any other position out there We need to know what you actually do to separate yourself from any other warm body we could hire. Frankly, this would limit the need for a cover letter, which are mostly unimpressive anyway.
I still support the idea of creating a job interview that actually tests the skills that they would use in their position. However, I think 3 days would be unrealistic. We already have many candidates on campus for single or two day interviews though. Instead of throwing them in front of 75 different groups of people, you could easily throw them into real life job situations and encourage them to show what they’ve got instead of showing they have the all-important skill of being grilled with questions by groups of 5-10 people. The presentation that many candidates do does seem to be of some value, but I would only include it at the percentage that a candidate might do it in their actual job. I would imagine for most people, presentations are a minimal part of their job.
One other wrinkle that I have thought about that I wanted to propose, even though I’m almost certain this is easily ripped to shreds is doing trial basis hires. I know that this is not the case at all campuses, but for many campuses, getting fired is exceedingly difficult. I propose that new hires be given a 6 month to 1 year contract that allows for a performance eval and possible termination based on performance. It would allow for employers to test out a candidate for a while before determining if they would be hired. Probably an extreme idea, but I just throught I’d mention it.
My response to Tom? Absolutely. I said in a conversation recently that I think the effect of Twitter is to make the user feel like there are more people present than actually are. A group of even 100 people, tweeting with regularity, in a centered period of time can feel like a ton. Student Affairs chat is a structured chat that involves a group of people coming together at the same time to tweet. It feels like overload. But I genuinely don’t think it’s that many people in the context of student affairs as a profession. And for the most part, the medium of Twitter appeals to a certain personality type. Users of Twitter are most likely extroverted (I’m saying users here not people who try it and quit) and they’re most likely willing to try something new and share information with people they barely know. Even the most shy and guarded individuals on Twitter are more open and expressive than the general population.
