Inclusion, Inc.

CHAPTER 7The Best Person for the Job—Merit-Based Hiring

Unstructured interviews are hiring managers' favorite hiring tool. They're also the worst predictor of on-the-job performance.

In studies published in the Journal of Industrial and Organizational Psychology, over 200 HR executives were asked to give their perceptions of the effectiveness of a range of hiring tools, such as aptitude and skills tests, unstructured interviews, personality tests, and assessments of cognitive strengths.

They considered the traditional unstructured interview to be the most effective.¹ In reality, every single other method predicted on-the-job performance more accurately.

Even when confronted with this information, HR professionals and hiring managers commonly refuse to believe that they themselves lack the judgment needed to assess a candidate well from an interview.

The study states, “HR professionals agreed, by a factor of more than 3 to 1, that using tests was an effective way to evaluate a candidate's suitability and that tests that assess specific traits are effective for hiring employees. At the same time, however, these professionals agreed, by more than 3 to 1 that you can learn more from an informal discussion with job candidates and that you can ‘read between the lines’ to detect whether someone is a suitable hire.” Researchers found their test subjects' belief in their own intuitive powers to be absolute.

In another study, researchers found that hiring managers placed more emphasis ...