Deconstructing Structured Job Interviews

 (image obtained from flickr.com)

I co-authored a recently-published study using a variety of methods to examine over twenty years of research on structured employment interviews. The full article runs over 40 pages long (not including 10 pages of references), but I'll save you the trouble of reading through the article in its entirety by highlighting some of the major conclusions:

• What is meant by a "structured interview" is inconsistent. There is general agreement that structuring an interview includes asking applicants the same questions and rating them on common rating scales, but there is less consensus on other characteristics that could be included in structured interviews, such as limiting follow-up questions from interviewers, limiting questions from job candidates, or taking notes.
• The most common techniques for structuring interviews are conducting a job analysis as a basis for the interview questions, using the same interview questions for all applicants, using better types of questions (such as situational and past-behavioral questions), using anchored rating scales, rating each question individually (as opposed to only making general ratings at the end of the interview), using multiple interviewers (i.e. panel interviews), and providing interviewer training.
• Smaller rating differences for legally-protected groups. Race, gender, and disability impact interviewers' ratings and decisions less in structured interviews, as compared to unstructured interviews.
• Applicants' ability to influence interviewers' rating is reduced. While impression management by applicants (e.g. self-promotion and ingratiation) is still a common occurrence in structured interviews, the effects of such behaviors impact interviewers' judgment less in structured interviews than they do in unstructured interviews.
• Personality may be more difficult to measure in a structured interview than in an unstructured interview, but little research has directly examined the topic of the validity of personality assessments in structured interviews.
• Situational and past-behavioral questions should be used together to attain maximum utility from the structured interview. Situational questions tend to measure job knowledge, while past-behavioral questions measure job experience, and they both are good predictors of future performance.

The article also presents over 30 research questions and propositions that can be used to guide future research and practice, but I will not summarize the details here. You can read through the article if you are interested in that specific information. But hopefully the bullet points highlighted above provide some interesting and useful information for those who currently use structured interviews in their selection process, those considering the use of structured interviews in the future, and those interested in researching the topic.

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Reference:
Levashina, J., Hartwell, C. J., Morgeson, F. P., and Campion, M. A. (2014). The structured employment interview: Narrative and quantitative review of the recent literature. Personnel Psychology, 67, 241-293. doi: 10.1111/peps.12052.