Interviewer perceptions of job interviews and interview structure

© 2020 Edward Charles HyattOne of the more consistent conclusions of selection research is that introducing structure in a job interview significantly improves the predictive validity of an applicant’s future job performance. Recommended forms of structure typically include predetermined questions and scoring and standardised processes intended to limit interviewer discretion, thereby increasing reliability and predictive validity. Despite broad academic consensus regarding the benefits of interview structure, practitioners continue to prefer less structured interviews. The apparent unwillingness for practitioners to use structured interviews is a long-standing and often lamented observation dubbed the researcher-practitioner gap. Notwithstanding lamentations about this persistent gap, there has been limited, and mostly quantitative, research on the perceptions and beliefs of users related to selection tools like structured interviews. This is almost certainly because the majority of selection research is guided by a professional sub-culture termed the psychometric sub-culture (Herriot, 1992, 1993). This sub-culture is almost exclusively focussed on psychometric properties because of the assumed purpose of a job interview as a one-way selection instrument for predicting individual job performance. This narrow focus inherently undervalues other practitioner concerns like implementation, applicant reactions, recruitment desires, and social interaction during the interview and likely contributes to a gap in understanding between the worlds of academics and practitioners. There is a concomitant lack of knowledge regarding how practitioners perceive individual components of interview structure because it has been inconsistently operationalised and rarely investigated in depth from a qualitative approach. This thesis investigates how practitioners perceive job interviews and interview structure by adopting an alternative research ontology, dubbed the social sub-culture, that explicitly values the worldview of its clients. The first part of the thesis relies on a qualitative research method called descriptive phenomenology (Giorgi, 1985; Husserl, 1973), supplemented by the data structure from Gioia methodology (Gioia, Corley, & Hamilton, 2013), to investigate the purpose and nature of the phenomenon of job interviews. The second half of the thesis examines individual components of interview structure and reconceptualises the dimensions of structure to more clearly distinguish the process components of an interview. To do this, I relied on Dipboye et al.’s (2004) lifecycle model of interview structure based on three stages of the lifecycle of an interview: development, conduct, and evaluation, in conjunction with Campion et al.’s (1997) comprehensive list of interview structure components. A series of in-depth interviews with working professionals sheds light on the purpose and nature of effective interviews and the role of interview structure as perceived by interviewers. The thesis generated a greater understanding of practitioner motivation for using interviews and extended scholarly knowledge of interview structure. It concludes that the participants view the interview as a relational tool for making social judgments and understanding applicants (and vice-versa) rather than as a measurement tool for predicting job performance. Four dimensions (Dignity, Richness, Social presence, Accurateness) constitute the “essence”, or core structure, of a successful job interview such that it would cease to exist if any of those dimensions were missing or hindered. Finally, the participants are not universally opposed to all aspects of structured interviews, but structure components that constrain social interaction and communication during the interview process are viewed less favourably. There is both theoretical and practical importance for developing a better understanding of practitioner perceptions and for identifying which individual features of structure are perceived more or less positively by practitioners. The findings validate a social sub-culture approach for studying selection practices and for conceptualising the interview as an interpersonal process rather than as a substitute for a psychometric instrument. The findings also imply that allowing interviewers some minor variability in the conduct of their interviews may be useful in terms of practitioner acceptance and for designing structured interviews that are more attractive decision aids. The thesis encourages future investigation into trade-offs between predictive validity and other outcomes of practitioner interest in the hopes of producing research that is deemed more relevant by practitioners, thereby closing the researcher-practitioner gap