Analyzing the Validity of Employment Interviews

The employment interview has been the key element used for determining a candidates’ worthiness in filling an open position. Organizations rely on employment interviews as a way to predict the future job performance and work-related personality traits of interviewees. Over the years validity of the employment interview has been under scrutiny, so it is no wonder that is has been the topic of many research papers. The definition of the employment interview is “a personally interactive process of one or more people asking questions orally to another person and evaluating the answers for the purpose of determining the qualifications of that person in order to make employment decisions” (Levashina, Hartwell, Morgeson, and Campion 2013, p. 243).

IM is a “desire to create particular impressions in others’ minds” (Leary and Kowalski, 1990, p. 35). IM theories suggest that interviewers may not be able to detect IM tactics (Liden and Mitchell, 1988; Wortman and Linsenmeier, 1977; Erdogan and Linden, 2006). Theories on deception, such as interpersonal deception theory (IDT), suggest that deception detection is a complicated task and requires cognitive resources that are already being utilized conducting the interpersonal interactions within the interview (Buller and Burgoon, 1996).

Empirical research on deception has shown that people can compellingly fake feelings, personalities, and attitudes (DePaulo, 1992) but perceivers typically are not capable of recognizing the deception (Barrick and Mount, 1996; McFarland and Ryan, 2000; Furnahm, 1986; Sackett and Wanek, 1996; Torisand DePaulo, 1984). In fact it is well documented through years of deception detection experiments, that people are barely better than chance at identifying truth from lies. One meta-analysis (Bond and DePaulo, 2006) found that average accuracy in deception detection experiments was only 4% better than