Whats The Single Most Effective Predictor Of Whether Youll Be Hired After A Job Interview? What happens in the first 20 seconds. Initial impressions matter: Interviews in general pose a particular challenge when it comes to predictive validity—that is, the ability to determine someone’s future performance based on limited data. Not only are they relatively brief but also, over the past twenty years, psychologists have repeatedly found that few of a candidate’s responses matter. What is significant is the personal impression that the interviewer forms within the first minute (and sometimes less) of meeting the prospective hire. In one study, students were recorded as they took part in mock on-campus recruiting interviews that lasted from eight to thirty minutes. The interviewers evaluated them based on eleven factors, such as over-all employability, professional competency, and interpersonal skills. The experimenters then showed the first twenty or so seconds of each interview to untrained observers—the initial meet-and-greet, starting with the interviewee’s knock on the door and ending ten seconds after he was seated, before any questions—and asked them to rate the candidates on the same dimensions. What the researchers found was a high correlation between judgments made by the untrained eye in a matter of seconds and those made by trained interviewers after going through the whole process. On nine of the eleven factors, there was a resounding agreement between the two groups.
Posted on: Tue, 18 Mar 2014 19:00:00 +0000
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