Are Job Interviews Missing the Boat? Essential Unanswered Questions Regarding Interview Anxiety
About the Project
The employment interview is the most commonly used method for assessing job candidates across industries and jobs. Its goal is to assess candidates' job-related qualifications; yet, there are a variety of factors (other than one's qualifications) that influence how an applicant performs in the interview. One such factor is interview anxiety. Most people can recall going to a job interview with mouth dry, palms sweating, and heart racing, knowing that they could not put their best foot forward because of interview anxiety. Those concerns are well founded: Interview anxiety negatively affects interview performance, and thus the likelihood of a job offer. Interview anxiety is particularly problematic for inexperienced applicants, such as first time job seekers, or new Canadians who are learning how to navigate a new employment landscape. Aside from the human cost of lowered self-esteem and missed employment opportunity, if promising and qualified applicants with interview anxiety are overlooked by organizations, the cost to the economy will be severe. When conducted effectively, the interview enables employers to determine if applicants' skills and experience meet the job requirements. In contrast, if the interview process misses the mark by not hiring the best candidates, this flawed interview process could damage the organization's bottom line in terms of performance, profitability, sustainability, and personnel turnover costs.
Our program of research addresses two key questions. First, how is interview anxiety related to job performance? If it is related to overall job performance or performance on some of its central tasks, then it contributes to the predictive validity of the interview. If anxiety is not related to job performance, then it is a source of error in interview decisions. Given the empirical evidence (including that of our pilot work) and theoretical basis, interview anxiety may be related to performance for socially-evaluative job tasks but not for non socially-evaluative ones. Thus, it is imperative that we refine our understanding of the predictive validity of the interview. We do this through our second question: why is interview anxiety negatively related to interview performance? The mechanisms by which anxiety affects interview performance could reside in the candidates' behavior, the interviewers' perceptions of the candidate, or both. Isolating these processes is an essential step toward designing interviews with better predictive validity, providing evidence-based advice for anxious interviewees, and training interviewers to better assess anxious candidates.
Our program of research is based on four complementary studies that employ varied research settings (lab and field) to maximize both methodological control and generalizability. We make use of varied samples, ranging from novice job seekers (university students) to more mature job seekers (employment center clients). Across the four studies, we measure interview anxiety by going beyond self-report (the traditional way interview anxiety is measured). Thus, we use interviewer-rated anxiety, and physiological and nonverbal markers of interview anxiety to inform our questions and triangulate on the measurement of our focal variable.
Our research will make important contributions to science by learning what interviewees are experiencing as they go through a job interview, and how applicants' experience of interview anxiety affects the ability of the employment interview to identify the most promising employees. By knowing more about interview anxiety, Canada's organizations will be better positioned to facilitate the hiring of the most promising employees, leading to more productive and globally competitive organizations.