The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

• The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews from the NY Times (2017) -- trashes the predictability of interviews generally, but touts the power of structured over unstructured interviews
• Google's Secret to Hiring the Best People from Wired (2015) -- similar to the article Rob sent out, cautions against the problem of confirmation bias in interviews.  Advocates the use of a consistent, concise hiring rubric based on specific criteria.  These criteria were determined in a meta-analysis of 85 years of data.  The #1 predictor of job success is performance on a work sample (our demo lesson?).  Tied for #2 were performance on cognitive tests (maybe educational background is our proxy?) and in a structured interview.  The key is that the structured interview has a much greater predictive ability than an unstructured interview:  "Structured interviews are predictive even for jobs that are themselves unstructured. We’ve also found that they cause both candidates and interviewers to have a better experience and are perceived to be most fair. So why don’t more companies use them? Well, they are hard to develop: You have to write them, test them, and make sure interviewers stick to them. And then you have to continuously refresh them so candidates don’t compare notes and come prepared with all the answers. It’s a lot of work, but the alternative is to waste everyone’s time with a typical interview that is either highly subjective, or discriminatory, or both."
• Don’t Blink! The Hazards of Confidence by Daniel Kahneman in the NY Times (2011) -- on how many of the things we are convinced we can predict end up being no more predictable than the roll of a dice.  He does end on a hopeful note, however:  "True intuitive expertise is learned from prolonged experience with good feedback on mistakes."