If interviews don’t work, shouldn’t we get rid of them?

In my role as an A/E/C marketer, one of my responsibilities is to help teams prepare for project interviews—even though clients would probably be better served by not conducting them at all. In fact, research has shown interviews to be a poor barometer for actual on-the-job performance.

In fact, clients would be better served avoiding interviews and relying solely on qualifications and proposals in making their decisions. Social psychologist Richard Nisbett has studied the psychology of interviews, focusing on the cognitive biases that we carry into and out of them. He refers to our misplaced confidence in our evaluation of interview candidates based on interviews as the “interview illusion:”

It’s as if we regard the impression we have of someone we’ve interviewed as resulting from an examination of a hologram of the person—a little smaller and fuzzier to be sure, but nevertheless a representation of the whole person. We ought to be thinking about the interview as a very small, fragmentary, and quite possibly biased sample of all the information that exists about the person. Think of the blind men and the elephant, and try to force yourself to believe you’re one of those blind men.

It’s not that Nisbett is suggesting interviews are entirely unimportant—it’s just that we severely overestimate their importance. We are better off considering most interview situations as instances of the fundamental attribution error—”the tendency for people to under-emphasize situational and environmental explanations for an individual’s observed behavior while over-emphasizing dispositional and personality-based explanations for their behavior” (Wikipedia).

Essentially, we discount situational and environmental factors in an interview and ascribe behavior to what an individual is “really like.” You can see how this issue compounds in an interview setting, where—if a client is really interested in a close examination of one project team versus two or three others, they must apply great restraint in how they consider the behaviors and actions of a given team member.