A Preliminary Look at Employment Interviewers' Proficiency at Combining Information Cues.

The most commonly stated and demonstrated shortcoming of the employment interview is its lack of reliability. Yet Wagner (1949) was able to conclude that the reliability of an employment interview is situation and interviewer specific. In this study, the author investigated the interviewer's scoring system, the way he weighs and combines the information he gathers as he attempts to make a personnel decision. This information processing includes: (1) assessing the interrelations of the cues; (2) assessing the validity of the cues for his given purpose; and (3) combining the individual validities while partialling out the common variance among the cues. Results show that: (1) interviewers make adjustments when they perceive redundant information; (2) they process negative information more accurately than positive information; and (3) they differ widely in terms of how valid and interdependent they perceive information units to be. The decisions or hiring recommendations were based almost exclusively on the overall evaluations of the information which the interviewers received and processed. If the final evaluation exceeded the base rate of success, the recommendation was to hire; if not, the recommendation was to reject. (TA)