In addition to a resume, it is believed that answers to formal questions like “Where do you see yourself in five years?” or “Tell me about one of your failures.”
Business psychologist Brian Swider of the Georgia Institute of Technology (USA) and colleagues conducted a study to find out how important the informal communication of the candidate with the interviewer is.
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The researchers conducted mock interviews with 163 students preparing for real interviews that they would have to go through in a week. The role of interviewers was played by 54 graduate students who received postgraduate education in the field of personnel management. The “interview” consisted of two to three minutes of informal conversation about non-work related topics (such as the weather), followed by 12 work-related questions.
Immediately after the informal conversation, the interviewers filled out a questionnaire in which they assessed the candidate on various parameters, in particular, they were required to indicate how qualified the candidate seemed to them. The interviewers then assessed the quality of the applicants’ answers to each of the 12 formal questions.
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The researchers were interested in the extent to which the subjective impressions of interviewers from informal communication with students will affect their further assessments. For comparison, they showed interview videos, which included only formal questions and no informal conversation, to four other HR graduate students. They then compared the scores given to the candidates in person and after watching the video.
It turned out that the assessments of HR specialists who directly communicated with applicants differed from those given by their colleagues who watched the video. In particular, if the candidate managed to make a good impression during the preliminary informal conversation, these scores were on average higher. Notably, the panelists who viewed the videos also rated the candidates on dimensions such as appearance, voice, and body language, and high scores on these dimensions correlated with high scores on question answers. However, these factors did not always fully explain the positive effects of informal communication. Previous research by Brian Swider has shown that in these situations, interviewers are especially impressed with emotionally stable, extroverted candidates with good language skills.
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The authors note that the first impressions of informal communication with the candidate, on the one hand, prevent interviewers from completely objectively assessing the professional skills of the candidate, but on the other hand, these impressions are based on an assessment of personal qualities, which can also be important for successful work. To smooth out the emotional effect of informal communication, they suggest that interviewers after the conversation and before the start of the formal interview itself ask a few more additional questions, the answers to which will not be strictly evaluated. The authors do not advise completely abandoning informal communication between the interviewer and the applicant, believing that the benefits of it still outweigh the possible costs.
Подробнее см. В. Swider et al. «Initial Impressions: What They Are, What They Are Not, and How They Influence Structured Interview Outcomes», Journal of Applied Psychology, January 2016.