No one ever says “I can’t” or “I won’t” in a job interview.

This comment, by one of our long-time clients, sums up the frustration of using self-report information when trying to make an informed hiring decision.

The candidate who shines on paper or in an interview often does not turn out to be “as advertised” when they show up for work. Even though we know better, resumes and interviews are two constants used by almost every hiring organization on the planet. “It’s standard practice,” agrees Forbes Human Resources Council. “But it doesn’t work.”

Understanding the Problem

Basically, interviews and resumes focus on three questions:

Have you done this before?

Yes.  

Can you do this?

Absolutely.

Will you do this?

Certainly.

Self-report statements related to experience, ability, and willingness account for most content within resumes and interviews. Unfortunately, research shows that 70% to 85% of resumes contain embellishments, prevarications – and lies. Interestingly, 88% of resumes are discarded without consideration, so how many of the remaining 12% are accurate and reliable? Furthermore, how many of the discarded resumes were from solid candidates that should have been considered? The odds aren’t good.

Moving on to work experience, more than 80% of companies use past experience as a primary criterion for hiring. The snag is that past experience, whether it’s actual job experience or job training, has little relationship to successful future performance. In fact, based on a review of more than 81 studies, researchers at Florida State University concluded: “Experience doesn’t predict a new hire’s success.”

Here’s why. While many companies have jobs with identical or similar titles, the activities and roles are not necessarily the same. Even within a company, people can have the same title but different managers who emphasize different aspects of the job. As a result, people in the same job don’t always learn the same skills. So, the odds that everyone in the same job is proficient at the same level is highly unlikely. Even larger differences occur when people come from different companies. Plus, just because a person held a similar job, doesn’t mean they were good at it.

Fundamental Flaws

Hiring is a high stakes event. Candidates view resumes and interviews as an opportunity to stand out and to present information that qualifies them for further consideration. The primary goal is to impress the employer with their accomplishments, the work they have done, and the potential skills they can contribute. For that reason, candidates tend to present themselves in the best possible light and embellish how they describe their roles and work activities.

Candidates are often more impressive in an interview or on a resume than they will ever be from that point forward.

Why Resumes Don’t Work

Words on a resume are carefully curated. Today, AI can assist candidates with phrases and keywords to deliver optimal impact. HR screening software is designed to search and find specific keywords, flagging resumes that have the right combination. This means the selected resumes are more similar than unique, making it difficult to discern differences among remaining candidates.

From that point, unique differences between candidates are often discerned from other criteria such as the brand recognition of previous employers, past experience, certifications, and recognizable educational institutions. In most instances, these criteria are minimally related to successful performance in the job.

Resumes are also easily influenced by personal bias. Bias can occur because the resume has too much information, not enough information, and in some instances no noteworthy information. Even the format and appearance of the resume can influence bias.

Unfortunately, all these reasons cause some candidates to be excluded when they should be included, and others to be included when they should be excluded.

Why traditional interviews Don’t Work

Unlike static resumes, job interviews are dynamic. The challenge with traditional interviews is to limit the extent of inconsistencies in the process, random actions by candidates, and human judgment by interviewers that can influence the outcome.

Inconsistency in the Process

• The interview questions themselves can take you down the wrong path if they are not standardized and job-related.

• The continuous flow of back-to-back interviews often causes interviewers to compare candidates to each other instead of measuring all candidates against an objective, established standard.

• The process used to record and score candidates’ interview responses has a major impact on the accuracy and reliability of results. Errors occur when there are no standard rating criteria and no structured training for interviewers.

Click here for practical tips to improve your interview process.

Candidate Dynamics

• What a candidate says and how they say it makes a difference. Candidates are motivated to make the best possible impression and provide socially-desirable responses – that may or may not reflect reality.

• Voice quality and appearance are other factors that influence interview outcomes.

• Incongruity between the expectations of the interviewer and the candidate also impacts results.

Interviewer Dynamics

• Research shows that interviewers consistently overestimate their ability to interview effectively. Interviewers often profess, “I know the questions to ask” or “I know how to read people” or “I just go with my gut.”

• What most interviewers don’t realize is that judgment about the candidate is made in the first two minutes of the interview. The remaining time during the interview is used to justify the quick judgment about the candidate whether positive or negative.

• Even with a well-established process, unconscious biases still exist. These biases can come from speech patterns, catchwords or phrases, demeanor, and physical characteristics, among others.

The core challenge with resumes and interviews is that there are numerous ways to arrive at the wrong decision. Whether mistakes arise from exaggerated self-promotion by candidates or by inadequate processes to evaluate the information provided, resumes and interviews often cause hiring organizations to make the wrong choice.

The best advice is to diminish the weight of these tools in hiring decisions, and better yet, to use more objective screening tools first.

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