Discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the traditional interview and the structured interview for assessing job candidates. Give examples.

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

• The traditional, unstructured interview serves the “getting to know you” function.
• The interviewer pursues different areas of inquiry with each job candidate and may ask different questions of each candidate.

• Current research provides evidence that traditional, unstructured interviews can have much lower validity than the structured interviews.

• A meta-analysis of unstructured interviews used to predict supervisory ratings for entry-level jobs yielded a validity coefficient of only .20.

• In a fully structured interview, the interviewer has a preplanned interview and a quantitative scoring scheme. Each candidate receives the same questions in the same order. The interviewer then rates the candidate’s answers on an anchored rating scale.

• Interviewers undergo training on question delivery, note taking, and rating. Such training standardizes the treatment candidates receive as well as the ratings and resulting interview scores. Such standardization increases interrater reliability, internal consistency, and validity.

• Questions that ask candidates to provide specific accounts of the behaviors they have used in the past offer information that is more relevant for interviewers to rate. Some behavioral interviews ask candidates to describe past performance, and others ask candidates to describe how they would go about doing something in the organization, such as developing a marketing plan or training course.

• Structured behavioral interviews usually require the interviewer to rate the value quality of the interviewee’s answer using some type of behaviorally anchored rating scale.

• A meta-analysis demonstrated that strongly structured interviews in which each candidate was asked the same questions and a formal scoring system was used had a validity coefficient of .57.