Technology and assessment


Do your interviewers get it right?


In recent years, there has been a significant increase in the number of tools used to help assess candidates, including personality tests, cognitive tests, and gamification. Notwithstanding the insights these tools may yield, interviews are still at the core of recruitment, and especially of the final decision. However, little has been done to assess how effective people are at conducting interviews, and whether they are able to correctly make the critical hiring decisions, explores Jason Ku, Founder of JKU & Associates.


damaging is sending top talent to your competitors when good candidates are incorrectly turned down. No interviewer goes into their interviews planning to make poor decisions; however, there is an abundance of evidence showing that many mistakes are made. If we can measure the effectiveness of interviewers and understand what is driving their decisions, we can take action to improve their success rates.


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Let us first explore how interviewer effectiveness can be measured, then what we can learn from the results, and finally we will discuss how you can perform this analysis for your organisation.


Defining interviewer effectiveness It is hard to define what effective interviewing is. Let us take Charlie, a manager at a professional services firm, who is conducting interviews for his company’s graduate recruitment. Charlie has multiple objectives when he is interviewing, including to:


12 Graduate Recruiter | www.agr.org.uk


e all know the pains of having the wrong person on our team, but equally


• Correctly identify candidates who will become high performers in the company


• Remain unbiased in his assessments • Clearly explain the role to the candidate


• Provide the candidate with the best experience to build the company’s brand, and


• Effectively represent the firm and uphold the firm’s values


In this article, we will focus on the first objective. Firstly, we must define what ‘become high performers’ means. We have found that different industries, companies, and even roles within the same company,


Charlie Says… Hire


Don’t Hire Hire Don’t Hire


His Colleagues… Agree


Disagree Disagree Agree


define this differently. Charlie’s company defines graduate recruitment success as candidates hired, who are meeting or exceeding performance expectations two years after being hired. I should mention that reaching an agreement on this definition does require some healthy debate. Some say success is achieved when new hires pass their probation period. Others argue for performance at six months, while some have made a case for a much longer time period. Whatever the definition, a similar analysis can be run.


With this definition, we can create the following success table. Charlie has made the right decision when:


The Company… Hires


Hires Doesn’t Hire Doesn’t Hire The Candidate…


Is performing well 2 years after being hired


Is underperforming (or has left) 2 years later


Joins a close competitor and is there 2 years later


Joins a non-competitor, or joins a competitor in a similar role, but left within 2 years


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