Describe the evidence for validity and reliability of employment interviews.

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Some information that could be included: An early meta-analysis of only 10 validity coefficients that were not corrected for range restriction yielded a validity of .14 when the interview was used to predict supervisory ratings (Hunter & Hunter, 1984). Subsequent meta-analyses that did correct for range restriction and used larger samples of studies reported more encouraging results. Wiersner and Cronshaw (1988) found a mean corrected validity of .47 across 150 interview validity studies involving all types of criteria. McDaniel, Whetzel, Schmidt, and Maurer (1994) analyzed 245 coefficients derived from 86,311 individuals and found a mean corrected validity of .37 for job performance criteria. However, validities were higher when criteria were collected for research purposes (.47) than for administrative decision-making (.36). Marchese and Muchinsky (1993) reported a mean corrected validity of .38 across 31 studies. A fourth review (Huffcutt & Arthur, 1994) analyzed 114 interview validity coefficients from 84 published and unpublished references, exclusively involving entry-level jobs and supervisory rating criteria. When corrected for criterion unreliability and range restriction, the mean validity across all 114 studies was .37. Finally, Schmidt and Rader (1999) meta-analyzed 40 studies of structured telephone interviews and obtained a corrected validity coefficient of .40 using performance ratings as a criterion. The results of these studies agree quite closely.
Regarding reliability, a meta-analysis of 125 interrater reliability coefficients with a total sample size of 32,428 derived from employment interviews revealed an overall mean of .68 (Huffcutt, Culbertson, & Weyhrauch, 2013). However, the 80% credibility interval, meaning that 80% of the true population coefficients fall within this interval, ranged from .42 to .94. In fact, an analysis of the level of structure of the interviews revealed that reliability was lowest when structure was low (i.e., .36), and highest when structure was high (.76). Given our discussion in Chapter 7 regarding the relation between reliability and validity, the best way to improve validity is to improve the degree of structure of the interview (discussed later in this chapter).