Interview Performance Vs Job Performance

As a hiring manager, you want to hire the best person for the job.

The United States Department of Labor estimates that a bad hire can cost your business between 30% to 50% of the employee’s first-year salary. The actual number may be higher, when you take into consideration other factors such as, for example, the impact that underperforming employees might have on their team(s), the additional effort required to manage them and, when necessary, the cost of starting the process all over to replace them.

And this is just the employer's point of view. It’s not fair to the new hire if, ultimately, it is the hiring manager who misjudged, but it’s usually the new hire who is let go, not the hiring manager.

Hiring is tough, even more so for roles for which an objective skills assessment is not feasible. The interview process is often subjective and not very structured, and each interview ends up being a little different, making a fair comparison between candidates almost impossible.

Part of the issue is that often hiring managers assume interview performance to be an indicator of job performance, but research has consistently proven otherwise. The interview proves the candidates's ability to answer questions, which may not correlate well with what they need to do on the job. A candidate may thus know the theory, but may not be the best at putting it into practice.

A further complication is that, even if nobody likes to admit it, we all suffer from bias, and tend to favor people who resemble us, who we feel connected to. We may even go as far as trying to convince ourselves we hired the best one amongst the candidates we interviewed - quite improbable as the performance of a person who has not been hired cannot be rated or compared.

A better way is to conduct more structured interviews. These can take many forms, but here are some ideas to consider.

Structured Interviews

Each candidate for a given role should be asked the same set of questions. Make them less about their past experience and more about the skills and requirements for the role you are hiring for. Ensure they cover the signal(s) you are looking for, and how to search that signal out.

Provide interviewers with rating guidelines. Your objective is to rate them fairly and consistently, and for that, you’ll need to define how you are going to rate their answers. You will typically look at how clearly they answered, the expertise demonstrated, time management, etc. You may want to consider as well the questions the candidate may ask. Do they rush the answer or take the time to ensure they understand it well enough?

Each candidate should be independently screened by at least two people, but new interviewers should always be paired with more experienced ones. While your objective is to shift toward a more data-driven approach, you still want to take into account the opinion of the interviewers. You could, for example, structure the rating so that the interviewers’ assessment counts up to 30% of the total score. Their opinion should not impact a yes/no decision if the candidate has scored quite poorly on the questions but rather, help you decide for candidates that may be on the edge.

Ensure that the interviewers are in agreement with the job description, the set of questions, and their rating. This is especially important for roles that vary between companies (eg. Eng Managers).

If possible, provide interviewers with a redacted CV, withholding information that may influence them in one way or another (their family name, age, marital status, religion, etc). I know it may sound extreme, and possibly uncomfortable but, for remote interviews, I would also consider turning off the camera. The less bias potential, the better.

Create a feedback loop. Proactively request feedback to interviewers and candidates, monitor metrics over time, and make sure to include Interview Performance Vs Job Performance.

Conclusions

Trying to predict future work performance from unstructured interviews will not yield optimal results. Some measures can be taken to improve how candidates are interviewed and assessed, but the process is still very flawed.

But, as Gayle Laakman McDowell wrote, "If a candidate comes in with an awesome recommendation from someone you trust and who has actually worked closely with that candidate, hire her -- even if her interview was just okay."

References

• Work experience poor predictor of future job performance
• When hiring prioritize assignments over interviews (paid)
• Poor predictors job interviews are useless and unfair.
• Standardized job testing
• Cost of a bad hire
• Is There A Link Between Job Interview Performance And Job Performance?
• Job Interviews Are Broken. There’s a Way to Fix Them (NYT)