BazermanMoore

Strategy 1: Use Decision-Analysis Tools 185
performance (Schmidt & Hunter, 1998). In part, this figure is so low because predicting
job performance is difficult and few tools do it well. Yet some assessment tools do
predict performance substantially better than the unstructured interview, and at a substantially
lower cost.
So why do people continue to believe so strongly in employment interviews? Managers’
robust faith in the value of interviews is the result of a ‘‘perfect storm’’ of cognitive
biases:
Availability: Interviewers may think they know what constitutes superior employee
performance, but their information is highly imperfect. Few companies
bother to collect useful data on the attributes that employees need to succeed within
specific positions or within the broader organization. As a result, managers must
rely on their intuitions to determine whether or not a job candidate has the qualities
needed for success.
Affect heuristic: People make very quick evaluations of whether they like others
or not, based on superficial features of the person such as physical attractiveness,
mannerisms, or similarity to self (Ambady, Krabbenoft, & Hogan, 2006; Ambady &
Rosenthal, 1993). Managers rarely revise these first impressions in the course of an
employment interview (Dougherty, Turban, & Callender, 1994). Managers sometimes
claim that interviews allow them to assess a potential candidate’s ‘‘fit’’ with
the firm, but this assessment is usually not based on systematic measurement of a
candidate’s qualities, and is little more than the interviewer’s intuitive affective
response.
Representativeness: Intuition also leads managers to believe that if a person can
speak coherently about her goals, the organization, or the job, then she will perform
well at the job. For most jobs, however, interview performance is weakly related
to actual job performance. Extroverted, sociable, tall, attractive, and
ingratiating people often make more positive interview impressions than others.
However, these traits are often less critical to job performance than other, less immediately
observable traits, such as conscientiousness and intelligence.
Confirmation heuristic: After interviewing a number of people for a position
and hiring one of them, managers learn only about the performance of the person
selected (Einhorn & Hogarth, 1978). Without knowing whether that person is performing
better than the rejected applicants would have, managers lack the data
they would need to assess whether their selection mechanisms are effective.
What is a better alternative to face-to-face, unstructured employment interviews? A
number of other selection tools are available, most of which are less expensive to implement
than interviews, including simple intelligence tests. But if organizations insist on
conducting interviews, they ought to use structured interviews in which all job candidates
are reviewed by the same set of interviewers and in which each interviewer asks
the same questions of each candidate (Schmidt & Hunter, 1998). In addition, interviewers’
quantitative assessments ought to be just one component fed into a linear
model, along with intelligence, years of relevant work experience, and so on.