This reply is addressed to several people who have asked about the importance of the interview both inside and outside this forum.
Individual impressions from interviews have little value, group impressions from interviews are extremely beneficial.
Back when I was doing medical school admissions, we had some faculty who were convinced that they possessed outstanding insight that would allow them to predict medical student performance on the basis of the interview. Because they were skilled clinicians and respected physicians at a major academic medical center they knew that they could accurately read a candidate within a few minutes.
Unfortunately, data were generated that showed that their prescience was flawed. First, the US postal service did a study showing that experienced human resource personnel could not accurately predict who would go "postal" on the basis of an interview.
Second, I watched those medical students where 2 interviews were excellent, the letters were excellent, but one single interviewer gave a less than stellar evaluation. None of these students ever had a problem. I recieved a substantial degree of grief about admitting a student when the senior faculty were sure that their interview skills had found a flaw. The flaw was in their impression that they could predict future performance.
Third, Jack Welch, the former CEO of General Electric says in his book Winning that at his best his executive level hiring decisions were correct about 80% of the time. This comes from the person who has been described as the CEO of the century. If his impression is only good 4 out of 5 times, imagine what mere mortals are like.
The point is that a single interview has very poor predictive value.
However, I am a strong believer in concept of quorum sensing
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quorum_sensing . If several interviewers have the same negative impression of the candidate, even though the numbers and letters of reference look great, then that information needs to be taken seriously. Articles have been written about collective wisdom in making decisions compared to expert opinion and collective wisdom usually outperforms expert opinion.
When making human resource decisions, i.e. hiring, firing, promotion etc the appropriate evaluation includes the synthesis of as much information as possible from a variety of sources. Believing a single source is likely to lead you astray.
Another significant advantage of having multiple sources and interviews in addition to making the correct decision, is that you have buy in from the group because they had the opportunity to provide input.
This was a little long, but there have been numerous posts about the importance or lack of importance of the interview. To state it again, a single interview has limited value, impressions from the group have strong predictive value.
Dan Remick, M.D.
Chair, Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, Boston University
