The Interview Is Not Enough — Here’s Why

More than just an interview is needed to ensure the best quality hires.

A lot rides on the job interview when it comes to evaluating candidates and making hiring decisions, but can a few minutes of conversation really provide an accurate picture of future job performance? Unfortunately not. No matter how carefully chosen the questions and how good interviewers are at asking them, an interview simply cannot provide a complete measurement of the candidate’s performance level and potential.

Why Interviews Fail as Evaluation Tools

Interviews are useful for providing more information about candidates’ experience and skills, but they are far from perfect in predicting future success. For one thing, people don’t act the same way during an interview as they do once they are hired. Sometimes their behavior is better — they pour on the charm and come across as better than they actually are when they’re on the job. Sometimes they are nervous and have a hard time showing their best side during the interview.

Additionally, interviews depend solely on how candidates answer questions about their skills, experience, and beliefs about themselves and their careers. They don’t know which questions will be asked, although if they prepare well, they can make some good guesses. Some candidates who will make good employees are not good at answering off-the-cuff questions or at connecting with people they barely know.

The skills that make the best interviewers are not necessarily the same skills that make the best employees. And yet, interviewers routinely evaluate candidates based on how they present themselves and perform during the interview situation, without taking anything else into consideration that could be relevant to their job performance.

Pre-hire assessments can predict eventual employee success in a particular job.

Adding Pre-Hire Assessments to the Process

Pre-hire assessments can add a new dimension to your hiring process by giving candidates a more low-key opportunity to share information about themselves. The information you glean from these assessments illustrates the probability that the candidate can do well at the job in question.

Pre-hire assessments can be cognitive or behavioral, and can tell hiring teams about how a candidate will acclimate to a job and whether that candidate will perform well over time in the position. But there is an even bigger advantage to pre-hire assessments that hiring teams don’t always consider.

Has anyone ever suggested that your hiring process could be biased or subjective? While you strive to be fair to all applicants, it is common for subjectivity and unconscious bias to creep into the hiring process when the interview is the main tool for evaluation. Assessments are standardized, administered the same way and with the same questions to all candidates. In this way, assessments can help to avoid the subjectivity and bias common to other parts of the hiring process and make it fairer for all applicants.

Narish International offers top-notch pre-hire assessments to help companies build higher performing teams. Learn more today!