Work Matters

Tag: Employee selection

  • Job Interview Advice: Go Heavy on the Perfume or Personal Charm, Not Both

    I was interviewed this morning for a Woman's Day story on job interviews.  As usual, just before talking with the journalist, I poked around peer-reviewed studies a bit.   I found quite a few traditional ones, but there was one that was weird but rather instructive.  It was a 1986 study by Robert Baron on the Journal of Applied Social Psychology.  In brief, the design was that 78 subjects (roughly half men and half women) were asked to evaluate a female job candidate.

    In one condition, she cranked-up the non-verbal charm, in the other she did not. As the article explains:

    Specifically,she was trained to smile frequently (at prespecified points), to maintain a high level of eye contact with the subject, and to adopt an informal, friendly posture (one in which she leaned forward, toward the interviewer). In contrast, in the neutral cue condition she refrained from emitting any nonverbal behaviors. These procedures were adapted from ones employed in several previous studies (e.g., Imada & Hakel, 1977) in which nonverbal cues were found to exert strong effects upon ratings of strangers. Extensive pretesting and refinement were undertaken to assure that the two patterns would be distinct and readily noticed by participants in the present research.

    In another condition, she wore perfume:

    Presence or absence of artificial scent. In the scent present condition, the confederates applied two small drops of a popular perfume behind their ears prior to the start of each day’s sessions. In the scent absent condition, they didnot make use of these substances. (In both conditions, they refrained from employing any other scented cosmetics of their own.) The scent employed was “Jontue.” This product was selected for use through extensive pretesting in which 12 undergraduate judges (8 females, 4 males) rated 11 popular perfumes presented in identical plastic bottles. Judges rated the pleasantness of each scent and its attractiveness when used by a member of the opposite sex. “Jontue” received the highest mean rating among the female scents in this preliminary study.

    The design was alternated so the subjects in different groups evaluated these imaginary job candidates with perfume or without, or with non-verbal charms or without, and researchers also examined the impact of having both perfume and charm, or neither.   The results are pretty amusing but also useful. It turns out that having just perfume and just charm seemed to lead to high ratings by both male and female interviewers.  BUT there was an interesting gender effect.  The blend of both perfume and charm did not put-off female interviewers, but it did lead to lower evaluations for male interviewers.

    This is just one little study, but it is amusing and possibly useful — if you are woman and being interviewed by a guy, the blend of perfume and positive "non-verbals" might be too much of a good thing!

    This is not a path-breaking study, but it is cute. And I it is interesting to know that Mae West sweet saying that " Too much of a good thing can be wonderful" has its limits!

    P.S. Go here to see the complete reference and the abstract.

  • Management Snake Oil: A Classic Example

    I was going through my email this morning and there it was, an email containing a classic sign that some vendor was promising more than any management tool or method can deliver.  The headline was "No More Hiring Mistakes Interviewing the Right Way." 

    This suggests they are selling snake oil because they are asserting that, if you use their tool or whatever, you won't make any hiring mistakes.  Perhaps their product or whatever (see here) does reduce the percentage of hiring errors, but there is no hiring method that eliminates all mistakes.  Plus interviews — although useful — are not the best method for selecting new employees (see this classic study for an evaluation of different methods). 

    I don't claim to know anything about this tool, but I do know that these folks are making excessive claims that cannot be supported any sound research,  This is yet another instance that supports a great observation from my hero James March, who once wrote me "“Most claims of originality are testimony to ignorance and
    most claims of magic are testimonial to hubris.”

  • Selecting Talent: The Upshot from 85 Years of Research

    I recently wrote about how the "talent wars" are likely to be returning soon in the U.S. (and indeed, there are signs they have already returned in places like China and Singapore), and how companies that have treated people well during the downturn will have an advantage in keeping and retaining the best people –and those that have not damn well better change their ways or will face the prospect of their best people running for the exits in concert with the inability to attract the best people.  A related question has to do with the problem of determining who the best people might be — what does the best evidence say about the best way to pick new people? 

    Its is always dangerous to say there is one definitive paper or study on any subject, but in this case there is candidate — a paper I have blogged about before when taking on graphology (handwriting analysis). But there is one article that just might qualify. It was published by Frank Schmidt and the late John Hunter in the Psychological Bulletin in 1998. These two very skilled researchers
    analyzed the pattern of relationships observed in peer reviewed journals during
    the prior 85 years to identify which employee selection methods were best and
    worst as predictors of job performance. They used a method called "meta-analysis" to do this, which they helped to develop and spread. The advantage of this method is — in the hands of skilled researchers like Schmidt and Hunter — is it reveals the overall patterns revealed by the weight of evidence, rather than the particular quirks of any single study.

    The upshot of this research is that work sample tests (e.g., seeing if people can
    actually do key elements of a job — if a secretary can type or a programmer can write code ),     general mental ability (IQ and related tests), and structured interviews had the highest validity of all methods examined (Arun, thanks for the corrections). As Arun also suggests, Schmidt and Hunter point out that three combinations of methods that were the most powerful predictors of job performance were GMA plus a work sample test (in other words, hiring someone smart and seeing if they could do the work),  GMA plus an integrity test, and GMA plus a structured interview (but note that unstructured interviews, the way they are usually done, are weaker).

    Note that this information about combinations is probably more important than the pure rank ordering, as it shows what blend of methods works best, but here is also the
    rank order of the 19 predictors examined, rank ordered by the validity coefficient, an indicator of how strongly the individual method is linked to performance:

    1. Work sample tests (.54)

    2. GMA tests …"General mental ability" (.51)

    3. Employment interviews — structured (.51) 

    4. Peer ratings (.49)

    5. Job knowledge tests (.48) Test to assess how much employees know about specific aspects of the job. 

    6. T & E behavioral
    consistency method     (.45) "    Based
    on the principle that past behavior is the best predictor of future
    behavior. In practice, the method involves describing previous
    accomplishments gained through work, training, or other experience
    (e.g., school, community service, hobbies) and matching those
    accomplishments to the competencies required by the job.     a method were past achievements that are thought to be important to behavior on the job are weighted and score

    7. Job tryout procedure (.44) Where employees go through a trial period of doing the entire job.


    8. Integrity tests (.41)  Designed to assess honesty … I don't like them but they do appear to work. 

    9. Employment interviews — unstructured (.38)

    10. Assessment centers (.37)

    11. Biographical data measures(.35)

    12. Conscientiousness tests (.31)  Essentially do people follow through on their promises, do what they say, and work doggedly and reliably to finish their work.

    13. Reference checks (.26)

    14. Job experience –years (.18)

    15. T & E point
    method (.11)

    16. Years of education (.10)

    17. Interests (.10)

    18. Graphology (.02) e.g., handwriting analysis.

    19. Age (-01)

    Certainly, this rank-ordering does not apply in every setting.  It is also important to recall that there is a lot of controversy about IQ, with many researchers now arguing that it is more malleable than previously thought. But I find it interesting to see what doesn't work very well — years of education and age in particular. And note that unstructured interviews, although of some value, are not an especially powerful method, despite their widespread use. Interviews are strange in that people have excessive confidence in them, especially in their own abilities to pick winners and losers — when in fact the real explanation is that most of us have poor and extremely self-serving memories.

    Many of these methods are described in more detail here by the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology. Also note that I am not proposing that any boss or company just mindlessly apply this rank ordering, but I think it is useful to see the research.

    The reference for this article is:

    Schmidt, F.L.
    & Hunter, J.E. (1998) The validity and utility of selection methods in
    personnel psychology: Practical and theoretical implications of 85 years of
    research findings,” Psychological Bulletin, 124, 262–274.

    P.S. Note the corrections, thanks Arun!