Why Interviews Don't Work

by Toby Poulsom MSc, Principal Consultant 80:20 Performance Solutions Ltd 

Companies often find the recruitment process quite difficult. I've been advising companies of all sizes about their recruitment strategy for over a decade. Although a problem of finding sufficient suitable candidates to interview and compare is common, even when there are good candidates available decision making is often still problematic.

The issue is about getting beyond a vague sense of general satisfaction and to the point of total conviction. Actually knowing that a good decision has been made. The fact is to reach true conviction about a decision typically requires evidence, guess work doesn't do it. The problem is that interviews simply don't generate the type of evidence people need.

Evidence Based Decisions

We all vary in the way strategies we use to make decisions. In general, however, we can classify the process as having several variables that fall into two simple categories.

The first category is that of the type of evidence we need to start the process of getting to conviction. Research demonstrates that different people have strong preferences for different types of evidence. This evidence falls roughly into four different sets, as follows:

SEEING: wanting to see certain things that give us a sense of someone or something being a fit.

HEARING: wanting to hear the right noises from other people, or directly from, for example, a candidate. 

READING: wanting to read a report, summary or data that demonstrates a fit.

DOING: actually getting involved in, for example, working with someone.

The second category is concerned with how we like to experience the above evidence and, again, can be divided into roughly four preferences, as follows:

# EXAMPLES: experiencing the above evidence a specific number of times will take someone past merely confident to convinced.

PERIOD OF TIME: experiencing the evidence over a set period of time, ould be hours, days, weeks or longer, will get someone to conviction.

AUTOMATIC: experiences the above evidence just once and is totally convinced.

CONSISTENT: no matter how much evidence they have, will never actually reach the point of conviction.

These distinctions have been extensively researched for a number of the psycho-linguistic profiling tools I use as a consultant. In fact the context in which they were researched is the general context of work.

What this tell us is that different people have different strategies for getting convinced. Some people may need to SEE and HEAR evidence over a PERIOD of a week to know for sure. Other people may just need to observe someone doing something well once to get convinced.

The statistics for the distributions of evidence required and how the evidence is processed is as follows:

Interviews Are Not Fit For Purpose:

Why conventional interviews often leave company's with an uneasy sense of uncertainty.

By Toby Poulsom MSc