Interview in Work and Organizational Settings

Introduction

This entry describes the central results of research on the selection interview. After a definition of the interview in psychological assessment main features of selection interviews are described. Prerequisites of psychological interviews are given and the central developments in the area of the selection interview are summarized. Then the results of meta-analyses on reliability and validity of selection interviews are presented. Finally conclusions and future perspectives on selection interviews are given.

Definition

A psychological interview is a kind of conversation between one or more interviewers and one or more interviewees which follows implicit and explicit rules and aims at gathering information for the description, explanation or prediction of individual behaviour or the relationship between people, or at gathering information about the conditions that change or stabilize individual behaviour or the relationship between people.

Features of Selection Interviews

Most frequently, one person interviews another. A group of interviewers interviewing one applicant is called a panel or a board. A psychological interview has the following three sections: (a) planning, (b) realizing, and (c) summarizing. Rules for realizing the interview are very often agreed at the beginning of a psychological interview. These rules relate for example to aims, duration, themes, recording and summarizing of the psychological interview. In addition, both interview partners behave according to implicit rules for a conversation. All conceptions of psychological interviews which lead to psychometrically acceptable interview results have an explicit planning in common. Thus, these interviews are (at least partially) structured or completely standardized. In partially structured interviews the questions are prepared; in structured interviews, the sequence of questions is also prescribed. In standardized interviews, furthermore, explicit rules are given concerning all relevant conditions for realizing and summarizing the interview.

Prerequisites

In all fields of applied psychology, the abilities of interviewers have been initially overestimated and the complexity of planning, realizing and summarizing an interview have been systematically underestimated. If interviewers want to arrive at satisfying decisions, i.e. not to regret later the low procedural quality in these decisions, the following prerequisites must be fulfilled. They (a) need to plan an interview systematically and to base it on empirically well founded research results, (b) must be well trained individually in realizing an interview, and (c) must summarize, after individual training, the results of an interview according to explicit rules.

Developments

In the last five decades there has been an increasing tendency to structure selection interviews. In addition to this, a growing number of selection interviews are founded on basic theoretical notions. The Situational Interview (Latham et al., 1980) is based on goal setting theory and its basic assumption is that people behave according to their goals. In contrast to this interview conception, the (Patterned) Behaviour Description Interview (Janz, 1982) is, like the Experience-Based Interview (Pulakos & Schmitt, 1995), based on the assessment prediction rule that the best predictor of future [Page 496]behaviour is past behaviour. In traditional selection interviews, personality traits were assessed. This, however, did not prove to be very useful. More valid information results from selection interviews based on a requirement profile derived from an empirical job analysis. Selection interviews of the ‘third generation’, e.g. Schuler's (e.g. 1989) Multimodal Interview, combine all these measures relatively successfully.

...