Malcolm Gladwell (author of Outliers, Blink, and The Tipping Point) published an interesting series of articles in his compendium What the Dog Saw.  In his article, “The New-Boy Network”, Gladwell chronicles the job courting process of recent Harvard graduate Nolan Meyers, and how first impressions and interviews factored into the process.

Gladwell goes on to highlight some interesting studies about how strongly we become married to our first impressions.  One study completed by Nalini Ambady, an experimental psychologist at Harvard, examined the nonverbal aspects of good teaching and concluded that first impressions were critical.  Ambady ultimately proved that observers could accurately rate a teacher based on a short, two second video clip.  Another study conducted by Tricia Pricket, a graduate student who wanted to test the adage “the handshake is everything”, had observers look at the first fifteen seconds of taped interviews as a basis for rating applicants.  The astonishing finding was that the untrained observer results had a high correlation to those actually conducting the interviews.  First impressions are often strengthened by the fact that we subconsciously spend the rest of the interview looking to prove ourselves correct, selecting what we hear.   This is an important bias to be aware of in the interview process, especially in light of the next set of findings.

The key issue with this is that we think the time we spend in an interview gives us a good “read” on candidates’ behavior in the work environment.  This is actually not true.  Research shows that the way people behave at any time is very dependent on the situation.  Richard Nisbett, a psychologist at the University of Michigan, says ”when you have an interview with someone and have an hour with them, you don’t conceptualize that as taking a sample of a person’s behavior, let alone a possible biased sample, which is what it is.  What you think is that you are seeing a hologram, a small and fuzzy image but still the whole person.”   While we think that we are experiencing character traits that will hold true in other situations, the research shows they don’t.  We “overlook the influence of context” which says that people react very differently in different situations.   We think candidates are inherently a certain way, while they really simply interviewed in a certain manner.

What I took away from this article was the need to proactively manage these biases through interview design.  We are more likely to rely on our first impressions when we “wing” an interview.   We fall into standard assumptions when we ask off the cuff questions and are more likely to assume that the character traits we see in an interview will be pervasive throughout a candidate’s career.   In a Designed Interview, everyone in the process has specific pre-planned questions which can be constructed to get much deeper into how candidates will act in other situations.  Take for example the standard question about handling stress that Gladwell highlights, “Tell me about a time when you had to do several things at once.  How did you handle the situation?  How did you decide what to do first?”  The candidate usually replies with a comment about how they need to be very organized.  A very similar question, structured a little differently can give dramatically different insight to a candidate - “You’re in a situation where you have two very important responsibilities that both have an impossible deadline to meet.  You cannot accomplish both.  How do you handle that situation?” I recommend giving your questions a tune-up to make sure you are getting the most out of your interview time.  And if you and your fellow interviewers don’t have at least a few that each of you know you will ask, I definitely recommend adding more design to your interview process.  This will ensure that the person sitting in front of you during an interview is the same person you hire for your organization.

Feel free to email me with your thoughts or responses to ckraft@jacobsmgt.com.