Interviewing Job Candidates is Often Unhelpful

Those who insist on interviewing candidates often make worse decisions. Shane Parrish at The Knowledge Project explains:

In the end, participants who were able to interview the students made worse predictions than those who only had access to biographical information. Why? Because the interviews introduced too much noise. They distracted participants with irrelevant information, making them forget the most significant predictive factor: past GPA. Of course, we do not have clear metrics like GPA for jobs. But this study indicates that interviews do not automatically lead to better judgments about a person.

This article contains many additional insights about interviewing. I highly recommend The Knowledge Project Podcast and Farnam Street Blog.

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Erich Vieth

Erich Vieth is an attorney focusing on civil rights (including First Amendment), consumer law litigation and appellate practice. At this website often writes about censorship, corporate news media corruption and cognitive science. He is also a working musician, artist and a writer, having founded Dangerous Intersection in 2006. Erich lives in St. Louis, Missouri with his two daughters.

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  1. Avatar of Bill Heath
    Bill Heath

    Interviewing for entry-level positions is quite different from interviewing for executive and managerial positions, or for consultative selling positions. GPA is meaningless at that point. For executives and managers I need to know leadership capability; for consultative selling positions I need to know that the candidate actually knows what that means. That is the biggest hurdle, overcoming bad habits learned during decades of selling what your company wants you to sell, instead of selling what the client wants to buy.

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