Tuesday, July 10, 2007

Are we interviewing people all wrong?

Another Gladwell piece in which, combining some of the work he later used in Blink, he argues that if we're going to interview people the way we have been (a romantic search for the "right" person), then we'd be just as well off with seeing a tape of them for two seconds with the sound off -
http://www.gladwell.com/2000/2000_05_29_a_interview.htm.

But if we want to know specific performance potential, then we should use the structured interview format that industrial psychologists are promoting. Guess I've been doing this all wrong, but I'm not quite sure from what I've read what really is the "right" way to do an interview. Here are a couple Google finds on the topic.

http://www.gao.gov/special.pubs/pe1015.pdf

http://www.hr-guide.com/data/A301.htm

Also, see this article from the Chronicle about interviewing - http://chronicle.com/jobs/news/2007/05/2007052501c/careers.html.