The validity of employment interviews: A comprehensive review and meta-analysis.
verifiedrich profile · Journal of Applied Psychology · 1994
McDaniel, Michael A.; Whetzel, Deborah L.; Schmidt, Frank L.; Maurer, Steven D.
How this was studied
A meta-analytic synthesis — it pools many primary studies rather than running a single design, so there is no single-study diagram.
What this article reports
The findings we extracted from this work, normalized into Principia’s relationship form (X → Y). Each feeds the synthesized models below.
structured employment interviews → overall job performance
structured employment interviews → task performance
employment interview → task performance
unstructured employment interviews → task performance
structured employment interviews → quality of hire
structured employment interviews → task performance
situational interviews → task performance
Models this article informs
The meta-analytic priors this article contributes evidence to — its place in the broader synthesis.
employment interview predicts task performance
situational interviews predicts task performance
structured employment interviews predicts overall job performance
structured employment interviews predicts quality of hire
structured employment interviews predicts task performance
unstructured employment interviews predicts quality of hire
unstructured employment interviews predicts task performance
In the authors’ words
The article’s own abstract.
This meta-analytic review presents the findings of a project investigating the validity of the employment interview. Analyses are based on 245 coefficients derived from 86,311 individuals. Results show that interview validity depends on the content of the interview (situational, job related, or psychological), how the interview is conducted (structured vs. unstructured; board vs. individual), and the nature of the criterion (job performance, training performance, and tenure; research or administrative ratings). Situational interviews had higher validity than did job-related interviews, which, in turn, had higher validity than did psychologically based interviews. Structured interviews were found to have higher validity than unstructured interviews. Interviews showed similar validity for job performance and training performance criteria, but validity for the tenure criteria was lower. The interview is a selection procedure designed to predict future job performance on the basis of applicants' oral responses to oral inquiries. Interviews are one of the most frequently used selection procedures, perhaps because of their intuitive appeal for hiring authorities. Ulrich and Trumbo (1965) surveyed 852 organizations and found that 99% of them used interviews as a selection tool. Managers and personnel officials, especially those who are interviewers, tend to believe that the interview is valid for predicting future job performance. In this article, we quantitatively cumulate and summarize research on the criterion-related validity of the employment interview. Our purpose in this article is threefold. First, we summarize past narrative and quantitative reviews of criterion-related validity studies of the employment interview. Second, we report research that extends knowledge of the criterion-related validity of interviews through meta-analyses conducted on a more comprehensive database than has been available to earlier investigators. Third, we examine the criterion-related validity of different categories of interviews that vary in type and in structure.
What the literature says about it
Attributed, open-access quotes from other works that cite this article, plus the citation-graph verdict tally. Corroborations and disputes, in one place — the honest-broker view.
supports “Structured interviews where the same questions are asked from every candidate, in a controlled conversation flow and evaluated using a well-defined rubric have shown to reduce bias [12] and also increase the ability to predict future job performance [13].”
supports “This finding confirmed the conclusions of McDaniel et al. (1994), Pearlman et al. (1983) and Schmidt and Rader (1999) regarding the importance of structured interviews in the selection process, because these researchers also obtained substantial correlations between structured interview ratings and job performance.”
supports “Structured interviews where the same questions are asked from every candidate, in a controlled conversation flow and evaluated using a well-defined rubric have shown to reduce bias [12] and also increase the ability to predict future job performance [13].”
Ancillary research
Neighbouring works in the citation graph around this article.
- 10.12691/education-7-7-4
- 10.1097/acm.0000000000003868
- 10.5688/aj710583
- 10.1002/ets2.12152
- 10.1109/access.2020.3004002
- 10.1111/j.1468-2389.2008.00438.x
- 10.4102/sajip.v34i3.750
Assembled from Principia’s registry — bibliographic record, extracted effect sizes, the models they inform, and open-access citing literature.