“I Know What You Want to Know”: The Impact of Interviewees ’ Ability to Identify Criteria on Interview Performance and Construct-Related Validity

The current study tested whether candidates ’ ability to identify the targeted interview dimensions fos-ters their interview success as well as the interviews’convergent and discriminant validity. Ninety-two interviewees participated in a simulated structured interview developed to measure three different di-mensions. In line with the hypotheses, interviewees who were more proficient at identifying the tar-geted dimensions received better evaluations. Furthermore, interviewees ’ ability to identify these evaluation criteria accounted for substantial variance in predicting their performance even after con-trolling for cognitive ability. Finally, the interviewer ratings showed poor discriminant and convergent validity. However, we found some support for the hypothesis that the quality of the interviewer ratings improves when one only considers ratings from questions for which interviewees had correctly identi-fied the intended dimensions. The idea that people differ in terms of how they assess social situations and flexibly adapt their be-havior on the basis of these cues has a long history in psychology (e.g., Argyle, 1969; Thorndike, 1920). In recent years, such individual differences have known a renaissance under the general term of social effectiveness constructs. According to Ferris, Perrewé, and Douglas (2002) socia