For the first time ever on The Psychology World Podcast, we are actually going to focus on business psychology and the great topic of job interviews. In the current job market, you simply cannot escape job interviews because a lot of people believe that they are good indicators of future job performance. Yet modern research published in 2024 shows how this is far from the case and more often than not, job interviews absolutely fail to predict a person’s ability to be an asset to the company, fit within the current team and how they’ll perform on the job. Therefore, in this business psychology podcast episode, you’ll learn how job interviews are failing us, the three main reasons why job interviews are not good indicators of future job performance and how can we improve the effectiveness of the recruitment process. A major purpose of business psychologists. If you enjoy learning about organisational psychology, the recruitment process and careers in psychology then this will be a great episode for you.
Today’s psychology podcast episode has been sponsored by Applied Psychology: Applying Social Psychology, Cognitive Psychology and More to the Real World. Available from all major eBook retailers and you can order the paperback and hardback copies from Amazon, your local bookstore and local library, if you request it. Also available as an AI-narrated audiobook from selected audiobook platforms and library systems. For example, Kobo, Spotify, Barnes and Noble, Google Play, Overdrive, Baker and Taylor and Bibliotheca.
How Are Job Interviews Failing Us?
When we really start thinking about job interviews, we have to admit that they are really, really strange. For example, imagine you’re a world-famous singer being asked to judge a singing competition. The only catch is that you cannot listen to the singers actually sing, instead you can only interview them about their songs. That’s it. You cannot hear their singing performance, you can only talk to them about songs. It makes no sense, does it?
That is effectively how job interviews have worked for the past 200 years. For some reason, employers believe that they can get to understand and predict future job performance by simply talking to someone about their skills.
Or to use an example more relatable to the audience of this podcast, if we’re a mental health service looking for a new psychologist so we want to see how effective they are at delivering psychological therapies to clients, the only way to test their skills is to have them deliver a therapy to a client. Yet instead, our base level is to simply talk to them about what they might do and we’re only interviewing them about their skills. That doesn’t exactly give us much of a measurement of their actual skills in the real world, does it?
Also, I should note here that I am not some jarred person who’s been rejected by interviews and failed them, so I don’t hate them. In fact, I get most of the interviews I’ve been for and I know how to sound good in an interview thanks to helping other students do interview preparation through my university’s Outreach work. Instead, I am just an aspiring clinical psychologist taking a look at the research behind job interviews.
In addition, Wingate et al. (2024) published a meta-analysis with over 30,000 participants and found that job interviews do not predict future job performance. In other words, interviewing a future worker might not be a useful way to make better hiring decisions.
Job Interviews Create The Myth of the Perfect Interview Question
One of the main problems with the job interview is that a lot of people believe that if you simply ask the right questions then you will uncover the truth about a job candidate. This leads HR departments and bosses to create situational judgemental scenarios, behavioural questions as well as technical assessments that the employers believe reveal the perfect person for the job.
In reality, the research tells a different story because whether or not you’re trying to assess a candidate’s behaviour, task-related skills or their interpersonal skills, interviews are still problematic. Since interviews show a low level of accuracy because structured as well as unstructured interviews don’t predict a candidate’s future performance.
Moreover, you should know that job interviews are “okay” at best in terms of predicting broader contextual behaviours and task-specific skills. This suggests that the standard interview format might not be effective at best, or too blunt of a tool at worst, to capture the nuances that diverse jobs require.
And I think if we apply this suggestion to our own profession of clinical psychology. The typical clinical psychologist never has two days the same, and they work with lots of different types of clients, some days are high-stress, other days low-stress. Some days a psychologist has to do lots of back-to-back sessions and other times they might be out of the office doing assessments or interventions in other settings. Also, some days they might be doing a lot of systemic work because of a particular client and another day they might be dealing with safeguarding issues.
How can an interview possibly capture how a psychologist would handle all those different tasks?
How could you possibly design interview questions to accurately understand how a psychology candidate would respond to each of these situations?
Where is the measurement precision?
On the whole, the problem with job interviews is that they are typically seen as a one-size-fits-all instrument for assessing a candidate’s capacity to do a job. Yet in reality, it isn’t possible to design interview questions that accurately demonstrate how a person will respond in the diverse situations that they will face in the job. Such as, what interview questions could you possibly create that would accurately measure how an engineer would investigate a Parcel Sorter failure or a sales representative’s client relationship skills?
You cannot.
Job Interviews Create An Illusion Of Accuracy
Another important reason why job interviews fail people is because in a job interview, you sit across from a potential candidate for 60 minutes. Within these 60 minutes, you ask them a whole bunch of inaccurate questions designed to gauge their future performance and in reality, their job interview performance only accounts for 9% of variance in future job performance.
That leaves 91% of variance uncounted for.
In other words, job interviews fail to explain the other 91% of how well a candidate will do in a job in the future. This is completely overlooked by the interview process and you can compare it to trying to predict the outcome of a football game by watching the players talk in the locker room. As you can tell, I don’t know much about sports.
Anyway, this failure to account for the vast, vast majority of the variance only goes to show that interviews are not valid ways to assess a candidate’s capabilities to do a job. As well as it is a complete and utter illusion that job interviews are accurate tools, and this can cost businesses dearly.
Recently, me and a friend of mine were talking about his placement interviews and how they were going at the moment, and I learnt two things looking back. Firstly, I know he has the skills for a clinical psychology placement because he’s done audits, he’s worked with his mum at an IVF clinic and he has medical experience, at least a little. Also, we bonded over our love of clinical psychology so I know he has the skills, the passion and the potential to grow and benefit from a placement in an NHS mental health setting. Yet he hasn’t gotten a placement yet and he sent me some of the interview questions and they are just shockingly bad at gauging how he would respond in a real-world work environment. This is why interview questions are so inaccurate and bad indicators of how people would do in the real world.
You only need to look around at your own workplace to see a few people who passed their interviews but are so, so bad at their jobs that you don’t understand how they’re working here.
You know I’m right about that.
Job Interviews Create A “Fit” Fallacy
The main reason why I wanted to do this podcast episode was because my dad does a lot of interviewing as part of this engineering job. He is basically a manager in all but name and he tells me about his interviewing from time to time. Whenever he talks to me about “fit” and the person’s skills, I have to admit that I am always sceptical because I don’t understand how he can understand how people “fit” within his team when the candidate doesn’t always meet the other people.
Sometimes my dad does take the candidate round the workshop, so that is slightly better.
However, a final issue with job interviews is that there is a massive overemphasis within companies on a cultural fit. At first, this sounds like a very good idea because you want someone who aligns with your company values, believes in what you’re doing and fits the team dynamics so there is less conflict and people can focus on their work (and making the company money). Although, the issue with the idea of “fit” is that it leads to homogeneity instead of company diversity.
Ultimately, this leads to the company workforce looking, thinking and acting alike whenever a company focuses on cultural fit. Again, this makes perfect sense because we are more comfortable round others who are like us in terms of similar backgrounds, interests as well as ways of working and thinking. On the other hand, this is a problem because it can certainly create an easy-going and harmonious workplace but just because someone fits into a company it doesn’t mean they should be working there. Cultural fit does not prove the candidate has the skills, abilities and experience to be working in the role they’re applying for.
On the whole, whenever a company focuses on cultural fit, the company risks creating an echo chamber where new ideas and perspectives are very rare and this can make an organisation neglect the actual capacities required for an individual to perform, and for the organisation itself to grow and develop. A person’s true performance doesn’t rely on cultural fit alone, it actually relies on a mixture of cultural fit and most importantly, the candidate’s current skills and capacity to do the job well and their ability to grow in the future as they learn and develop their skills.
For example, in my own experience, when it comes to other Student Ambassadors, every single one of them are near perfect cultural fit, but it certainly doesn’t make them good ambassadors. They might want to support students but they aren’t social, they don’t talk with the students and engage with them. Those are core aspects of the job. Most of the time ambassadors have to be pushed to engage with students or they just stand in the corner talking with their backs to the students.
Thankfully, there are a lot more good ambassadors than bad ones, but still. If job interviews were so great then all these ambassadors who cannot do their jobs would not be getting in.
Bringing this back to job interviews, this is only further proof that job interviews might be able to evaluate cultural fit, but they are very weak in predicting potential and future job performance.
How Can We Improve The Job Recruitment Process?
One of the main duties of a business psychologist is helping organisations with their recruitment processes, so I want to have a quick look at some ways to improve an organisation’s hiring processes to help overcome these issues.
Firstly, an organisation can focus on past performance as a more accurate indicator of future job performance. An organisation can do this by digging and examining a candidate’s concrete accomplishments and how a candidate achieved these in the first place. This is drawing on real-world experience so you can see how a candidate has actually managed in the real-world workplace.
Secondly, an organisation can use a diverse range of assessment tools in their recruitment process. For instance, they could use an assessment centre that uses a wide range of job stimulations, skills assessments and work sample tests to evaluate a candidate based on their actual job-related tasks. Also, the added benefit of doing this is that this method evaluates candidates on their job-related skills instead of their ability to perform well in an interview.
Finally, organisations can focus on cultural contribution instead of exclusively on cultural fit. I mention this because an organisation could look for a candidate that fits their current organisational culture whilst making sure they can contribute positively and even go as far as enhance your organisational culture at the same time.
Business Psychology Conclusion
As much as I never look at business psychology, I have to admit that I think I will be investigating this subdiscipline of psychology over the course of the next year. I’ll be finishing my Masters in September and then I’ll be off into the world of work, hopefully a mental health job, and I love psychology because you can apply it to everyday life. Therefore, as much as I say I am not interested in organisational psychology, I actually think as I start moving into the working world and I can start to place some of the research findings into the world around me, I think my interest will only grow.
For example, it’s been interesting learning about how job interviews are failing us because they create an illusion of accuracy, the myth of the perfect interview question and the focus on cultural fit. These are all problems that not only negatively impact job candidates, but the organisations themselves too. Thankfully, there are ways like focusing on past performance, focusing on cultural contribution instead of cultural fit and using a diverse range of assessment tools that can help organisations overcome these problems.
And I think the most exciting thing about this topic is that jobs are meant to nurture a person’s potential, their skills and their experiences. As I try to gain more work experience in mental health settings, I am really looking forward to the future because I get to learn a lot, develop my skills and take another step closer to hopefully becoming a fully qualified clinical psychologist.
Therefore, I’ll end this podcast episode by saying that all of us could be potential game-changing employees for a business as much as we might doubt it because of our current skills. Yet I want you to remember that always try to improve your interview skills because of the current state of the job market and recruitment processes, but just remember something for me.
You, as the game-changing employee, might not interview the best, but your true potential is just waiting to be unlocked, developed and nurtured. You are probably so much better than you think, so keep applying to jobs, keep trying to become a psychologist and keep taking steps towards your dream career.
It might seem impossible but you can get there. I believe in you, so please believe in yourself.
I really hope you enjoyed today’s clinical psychology podcast episode.
If you want to learn more, please check out:
Applied Psychology: Applying Social Psychology, Cognitive Psychology and More to the Real World. Available from all major eBook retailers and you can order the paperback and hardback copies from Amazon, your local bookstore and local library, if you request it. Also available as an AI-narrated audiobook from selected audiobook platforms and library systems. For example, Kobo, Spotify, Barnes and Noble, Google Play, Overdrive, Baker and Taylor and Bibliotheca.
Have a great day.
Business Psychology References and Further Reading
Basch, J. M., Melchers, K. G., Kurz, A., Krieger, M., & Miller, L. (2021). It takes more than a good camera: which factors contribute to differences between face-to-face interviews and videoconference interviews regarding performance ratings and interviewee perceptions?. Journal of business and psychology, 36, 921-940.
Oh, I. S., Postlethwaite, B. E., Oh, F. S. I. S., Postlethwaite, B. E., & Schmidt, F. L. (2013). Rethinking the validity of interviews for employment decision making. Received wisdom, kernels truths, and boundary conditions in organizational studies.
Sackett, P. R., Zhang, C., Berry, C. M., & Lievens, F. (2022). Revisiting meta-analytic estimates of validity in personnel selection: Addressing systematic overcorrection for restriction of range. Journal of Applied Psychology, 107(11), 2040.
Tippins, N. T., Oswald, F. L., & McPhail, S. M. (2021). Scientific, legal, and ethical concerns about AI-based personnel selection tools: a call to action. Personnel Assessment and Decisions, 7(2), 1.
Wingate, T. G., Bourdage, J. S., & Steel, P. (2024). Evaluating interview criterion‐related validity for distinct constructs: A meta‐analysis. International Journal of Selection and Assessment, 33(1), e12494.
Zhang, D. C., Highhouse, S., Brooks, M. E., & Zhang, Y. (2018). Communicating the validity of structured job interviews with graphical visual aids. International Journal of Selection and Assessment, 26(2-4), 93-108.
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