Belief in the unstructured interview: The persistence of an illusion

Unstructured interviews are a ubiquitous tool for making screening decisions despite a vast literature suggesting that they have little validity. We sought to establish reasons why people might persist in the illusion that unstructured interviews are valid and what features about them actually lead to poor predictive accuracy. In three studies, we investigated the propensity for “sensemaking” - the ability for interviewers to make sense of virtually anything the interviewee says—and “dilution”—the tendency for available but non-diagnostic information to weaken the predictive value of quality information. In Study 1, participants predicted two fellow students’ semester GPAs from valid background information like prior GPA and, for one of them, an unstructured interview. In one condition, the interview was essentially nonsense in that the interviewee was actually answering questions using a random response system. Consistent with sensemaking, participants formed interview impressions just as confidently after getting random responses as they did after real responses. Consistent with dilution, interviews actually led participants to make worse predictions. Study 2 showed that watching a random interview, rather than personally conducting it, did little to mitigate sensemaking. Study 3 showed that participants believe unstructured interviews will help accuracy, so much so that they would rather have random interviews than no interview. People form confident impressions even interviews are defined to be invalid, like our random interview, and these impressions can interfere with the use of valid information. Our simple recommendation for those making screening decisions is not to use them.