[MUSIC] The job interview. If you've applied for a job, you have almost certainly had a job interview. In fact, it's probably true to say that we would be very surprised to be offered a job without going through some sort of interview process. Studies in the U.S.A., U.K., France, and elsewhere, have consistently found that interviews are used in well over 90% of job selection procedures. Moreover, there is a very good chance that at some point in your life you will be conducting interviews yourselves. So the job interview is something every working person needs to understand. But because we take interviews so much for granted, we can also easily avoid thinking about them critically, and seeking the answer to some basic questions such as, what is a job interview? What different forms can job interviews take? How could a job interviews as a method of selecting employees? How can an employer improves the interview? How can interviewees improves their chances of success by applying the finding of research. In this introductory session, we will give you a brief overview of these issues before looking at them in some more detail in the sessions that follow. So the first question to consider is, what is an interview? This may seem too obvious a question but obvious questions can make us reflect on what we have taken for granted and consider implications we may not have thought about. First and foremost, an interview is a social interaction between an interviewee and interviewer or interviewers. A conversation between people. That being the case, it is potentially vulnerable to all the problems human interactions and conversations are prone to. Misunderstandings, misjudgments, different expectations, biases and so on. This as we will see has very significant implications for the value of job interviews as a selection lesson. But if it interferes a conversation it is a conversation with a purpose. The interviewer is seeking to discover whether the interviewee would make a productive employee. But at the same time, the interviewee is making judgements about the job on offer, about the employing organization based on his or her experience of the interview. The outcome of the interview will be that the interviewee will or will not be offered the job. But the interviewee may or may not choose to accept the offer. An interview is a two way process of selection. I have pointed out that an interview may involve a single interviewer or more than one interviewer, a so called panel interview. But that is only one of the ways in which interviews can be differentiated. In fact, interviews can be subdivided in terms of whether they involve one interviewer or a panel of interviewers, whether they are unstructured or structured, that is whether they involve free flowing conversations that can vary between candidates or have fixed structures that the interviewer must adhere to throughout the selection process. Interviews can also be distinguished in terms, whether they take place face to face, as had been the traditional case, or whether they involve media such as the telephone, Skype, etc. In an increasingly globalized job market, the e-interview, is inevitably becoming more and more commonplace. Understanding that there are different forms of interview, allows us to consider the question, of whether interviews are a good selection method. So that in turn, applied us to just think about what we mean by good, in relation to selection methods. Selection methods such as interviews, cognitive ability tests, personality measures, assessment centers, and so on, need to be judged in terms of a number of criteria including validity, that is predictive power; reliability, that is consistency; utility, or cost effectiveness, fairness, an equal chance to all applicants, and generalized ability, the extent to which you can be used in a wide range of situations. If job interviews are not valid, in the sense that they accurately predict how well an applicant will do on the job, then they fail in the basic requirement of a selection method. In fact, and as we will explore in detail later, the validity of job interviews varies enormously depending on the type of interview involved. A selection message has obviously got to be reliable or consistent. But it also has to have utility, be cost effective. It should be fair in the sense of not discriminating against particular groups of applicants, gender groups, ethnic groups, etc. And it should ideally be usable in a range of situations and contexts. Again, we will see as we go into this in more depth the different forms of interview rate differently against those criteria. Understanding this will allow us to answer the question of how an employer can improve the interview he or she employs. The answer being in essence that the interviewer should adopt the form of interview which most strongly demonstrates desirable characteristics, such as validity, fairness, and so on. Finally, we come to the question of how potential interviewees, which means pretty much all of us at some time or other, can use an understanding of the interview process and a very extensive amount of related research to inform their own performance in interviews. Incidentally in preparations of this talk I do how to succeed a job interviews, I got 3.3 million hits starting with six simple interview tips that will get you the job offer. I was quite convinced by this, almost tempted to spend 47 US dollars on the complete interview answer guide that it advertised. You never know when you might need it. In fact, the understanding that an interview is a social interaction, which we touched on earlier, and that research has demonstrated how attribution biases, stereotyping, etc can impact on interview decisions may not guarantee success in an interview. But it can provide potential useful knowledge of the processes of work. In the next session, we will look at the traditional form of interview and see why it is a flawed method of selection. Thank you [MUSIC]
