Employment Interview

Social and Cognitive Factors in Interviews

The social nature of the interview distinguishes it from many other types of selection techniques, such as paper-and-pencil and computer-based tests. Therefore, a great deal of research has examined how the [Page 199]interaction between candidate and interviewer influences interview outcomes. Unlike some other kinds of selection techniques, for which a candidate's score is primarily under his or her control, high performance on an interview requires both the candidate to perform well and the interviewer to recognize that performance and assign high ratings. Therefore, researchers have also studied the role that interviewers play in the interview process, particularly how their decision-making and cognitive processes can affect interview outcomes.

There is evidence that a variety of social and cognitive factors can influence interviewer ratings. Unfortunately, these factors tend to be irrelevant to the KSAOs interviews are designed to measure, thus making their influence problematic. Below are some of the most common research findings in this area.

• Interviewers tend to overweight negative information and information obtained near the start of the interview (i.e., primacy effects) and near the end of the interview (i.e., recency effects).
• Some interviewers assign higher ratings to candidates who are similar to them on characteristics such as race, sex, education, and social background (i.e., the similar to me effect).
• Interviewers can be influenced by various nonverbal cues from interviewees, such as physical attractiveness, smiling, and eye contact.
• Interviewers tend to allow their preinterview impressions of candidates (e.g., based on their employment application) to influence their interview evaluations. For example, interviewers often unknowingly allow their initial impressions to affect how they gather and interpret information during an interview.
• Interviewers are often influenced by a variety of impression management behaviors, which many interviewees use to present themselves in a favorable light. For example, impression management tactics such as overemphasizing one's role in past successes and complimenting the interviewer have been shown to result in higher interview scores.

Although these factors can have a detrimental impact on interview outcomes, their effects tend to be rather small. In addition, some of these factors may be related to success on the job (e.g., smiling and eye contact for customer service jobs, impression management behaviors for sales positions), and therefore their influence may actually increase the validity of interviewer judgments in some cases.

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