[lbo-talk] a bitch needs to fan herself

[Miles Jackson]

Tayssir John Gabbour wrote:
> On 2/17/07, Miles Jackson <cqmv at pdx.edu> wrote:
> 
>>joanna wrote:
>>
>>>You make them persuade you. This is what persuades them that they want
>>>you. All subtly, of course.
>>>You are supremely at ease. An interview is an acting job.
>>
>>Which is exactly why job interviews are such a pathetic method for
>>hiring people.  We have decades of evidence that interview performance
>>has no correlation with actual job performance in most fields, but we
>>carry out this cultural ritual of job interviews to "make sure" the
>>applicant is the "right person" for the job.  It's a bloody waste of time.
> 
> 
> Respectfully, I'm not so sure this conclusion is correct, from the
> perspective of a corporation.

Regardless of the beliefs of corporate managers about the importance of 
interviews in the selection process, interview performance is useless as 
an indicator of actual job performance.  There are hundreds of studies 
that verify this. Organizational psychologists recommend the use of 
valid job selection procedures in the place of interviews, but the 
evidence is more or less ignored.  If a corporation's goal is to make 
money, you would think their perspective would be "let's use the most 
valid job selection procedures possible to obtain excellent employees 
and increase profitability".  Strangely, that's not what's going on.


> 
> Personally, I advise businesses to maybe offer a puzzle to candidates
> applying for a programming position. Nothing stressful; email them
> some (time-respecting, relatively simple) programming puzzles and ask
> them to maybe solve one of them. (After all, would you hire a juggler
> without seeing them juggle?)

Sure, you're on the same page as the organizational psychologists: give 
people relevant work samples, assess their performance on the kind of 
work they'll be doing in the job.  That sort of assessment is a far, far 
more valid predictor of job performance than an interview is.

Miles