Assessment Through Interviewing

152 Pages·1978·7.206 MB·English

by  G. Shouksmith (Auth.)

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Assessment through Interviewing
SECOND EDITION
BY
GEORGE SHOUKSMITH
Department of Psychology
Massey University, New Zealand
PERGAMON PRESS
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Copyright © 1978 George Shouksmith
All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in
any form or by any means: electronic, electrostatic,
magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording or
otherwise, without permission in writing from the
publishers
First edition 1968
Second edition 1978
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Shouksmith, George
Assessment through interviewing. — 2nd ed.
1. Employment interviewing
I. Title
658.31Ί2 HF5549.5.16 77-30489
ISBN 0-08-021152-6 (Hardcover)
ISBN 0-09-021151-8 (Flexicover)
Printed in Great Britain by A. Wheaton & Co. Ltd., Exeter
Preface to the Second Edition
The use and practice of interviewing in selection and other assess-
ment situations was the focal point of the first edition of this
book and remains so in the second edition. Changes in this
edition are introduced mainly to up-date basic material. I have
used the first edition for a text for innumerable courses on
assessment interviewing held both in the United Kingdom and
in New Zealand. It has proved to be a very useful handbook for
guiding teachers, university students, industrial and commercial
managers, and public servants through these courses, and in prac-
tice. The second edition retains, therefore, the basic material and
format of the first. From follow-up evaluations of the training
programmes in which it was used, however, certain needs for
expanding the material were revealed. This edition includes
extended material on planning for the interview and on the con-
duct of the interview, aimed at making its coverage of the basic
concerns more comprehensive. Use of groups for individual
assessment and development, particularly in human relations
training contexts, has increased immeasurably in the late sixties
and early seventies. It seemed appropriate, therefore, to give a
more extensive treatment of the theory and practice of group
dynamics so as to round off the whole picture. Finally, both
research and practice in the use of the interview therapeutically
have advanced over the past few years, and so the use of counsel-
ling interviews receives somewhat more attention in this edition
than it did in the last.
Many colleagues and friends have helped develop my thinking
about interviewing through providing feedback on their use of
the book and by contributing to teaching programmes and semi-
vu
viii Assessment through Interviewing
nars based on the text. My thanks are expressed to them, par-
ticularly those in the Department of Psychology at Massey Uni-
versity and those friends in N.A.C.,Braith Hyde and Don French,
who have helped me to relate theory and practice. My thanks also
go to Mrs. Joan Judd for her patience and efficiency in typing
this second edition of the Handbook.
PARTI
Practising Individual Interviewing
C H A P T ER 1
The Nature of the Interview
There is a very real sense in which it can be said that there is no
such thing as the interview but that there are many interviews.
The personnel officer brings a candidate into his office to assess
his suitability for a particular job; the teacher passes on to
parents information about their son's or daughter's progress; the
doctor tries to help a patient by sorting out some of his
troubles: all are engaged in interviewing in one form or another.
Interviewing can be used in many different ways and for many
different ends, and each kind of interview has its own methods
and characteristics.
There are selection and placement interviews used by
managers and executives to choose staff; there are vocational
guidance interviews, counselling interviews to help the
emotionally disturbed, and survey interviews used by market
researchers; then there are the various forms of group interview-
ing, used for problem solving, assessment, or therapy, and
diagnostic interviews used by clinical psychologists. More
recently, organizational psychologists have introduced into
industry appraisal interviews linked to participative manage-
ment programmes and organizational development. Exit inter-
views have been introduced for staff leaving, and attitude
change programmes have been used to motivate existing staff
and increase their job satisfaction. There seems no end to the
l
2 Assessment through Interviewing
diversity of uses in which the face-to-face encounter we call the
interview can be employed.
Even within any one type of interview there is by no means
only one method. Selection interviews can be conducted by a
Board or an individual, and counselling interviews may be
psychoanalytic or nondirective in orientation according to the
beliefs of the counsellor. All these differences adding to the
varied nature of interviewing have made many people critical of
interviews, particularly those concerned with assessment. Critics
point to the lack of standardization and maintain that because
of this the interview must of necessity be unreliable. But in one
sense the very lack of standardization in the interview is its
major strength as well as its major weakness. If, for example, we
compare an interview with a psychological test this will become
clear. A psychological test is a standardized measuring instru-
ment, but its application is limited to the type of person and
the type of situation for which it was prepared. Once you
transfer to another situation and test some other kind of person
with it, then it immediately loses value as a measuring
instrument. The interview, on the other hand, has the supreme
advantage of flexibility, so that with slight modification it can
be used in any set of circumstances. It also has the advantage of
flexibility in another sense. Whereas the test measures one or
two aspects of a person only, the interview can be used to get a
global picture of a whole individual. Furthermore, there are few
if any personality tests which can validly be used in industrial or
commercial settings, so that the interview remains the only
practical method of assessing personality.
Since the interview has advantages and in some respects
unique possibilities, it would seem ridiculous to deny its use
completely merely because it is unstandardized and because
some interviews are of little value. A more sensible approach
would be to attempt to isolate and consolidate good interview-
ing. The problem is to produce a reliable and valid technique
without losing flexibility. As Bass (1968) points out: "The
interview presents a particular challenge to the personnel and
social psychologist, for no matter what can or cannot be
The Nature of the Interview 3
demonstrated about its utility as an assessment device, it is
almost universal in use for selection purposes." From a practical
viewpoint it would seem best, therefore, to use our psychologi-
cal research findings and technology to make our assessment
interviews as good and effective as possible.
One difficulty faces us in any attempts we make to achieve
this aim. Many people like to think that they are naturally good
at interviewing. It is consequently difficult to persuade them of
the need for improvement in their interviewing techniques or of
the possibility that their interviewing and the assessments they
derive from interviews could possibly be improved by training.
The worst offender is the self-styled natural expert who tells
me: 'Of course, I'm pretty good at summing a man up myself.
They only have to be in the room for a few minutes and I get
the measure of them. I always say either you are born a good
interviewer or you are not."
Firstly, he is the one who may well arrive at biased
conclusions based on initial perceptions which may well be
irrelevant to the assessment task in hand. Secondly, he is
unlikely to accept any criticism of his own skills or techniques
and thus never improve. In demonstrable truth, however, not
only can interviewing be improved by training — and even the
odd interviewer who was not "born", be "made" by training —
but even the best interviewer has faults which, however minor,
can be corrected. A colleague of mine who was one of the most
painstaking and thorough interviewers I have known, once
admitted that he had found himself biasing his interview
assessments of any candidate who wore a hacking jacket.
Completely irrationally, he just could not stand people wearing
flaps at the back of their jackets, and until he realized this he
was, subconsciously almost, marking down anyone who
appeared in such a dress. The assessment one makes can easily
be biased by prejudices. One of those people who was a "born
interviewer" once admitted that the first thing he looked at in a
candidate was the school tie. He had certain preferences which
rightly or wrongly would bias his judgement. A prejudice may
lead you in the right direction but equally it might not. Your
4 Assessment through Interviewing
judgement of a person will remain biased until you either erase
these prejudices from your mind or at least recognize and
control them. Such biases lead to unreliability in the interview.
Technically, "reliability" refers to the consistency of measure-
ment. If a measure of anything is not consistent, varies
according to who makes the measure, and so on, it can hardly
be a useful measure. An interview which cannot be relied upon
to give the same answer on two or more occasions is hardly a
suitable tool for personnel assessment.
Hollingworth as early as 1929 (Hollingworth, 1929) made the
serious criticism of interviews that compared with standardized
tests they were woefully prone to inconsistent appraisals. He
quotes an investigation in which 12 sales managers interviewed
57 prospective employees. The results, to quote Hollingworth,
show that "any given applicant is likely to receive ratings
placing him at any point in the scale from first position to last.
Applicant C, for example, is given position 1 by one judge, 57
by another, 2 by a third, and 53 by a fourth . . .": at first sight
a complete condemnation of the interview. One must re-
member, however, that interviewing techniques have had a
chance to improve since the twenties, and, moreover, even the
data collected by Hollingworth is not as clear-cut as it appears
at first sight. Laird (1937), for example, has pointed out that in
reworking the original data he discovered that although there
were large discrepancies throughout, some pairs of sales
managers had rating lists which correlated as highly as 0.83.
Thus a better conclusion would appear to be merely that some
people make reliable interviewers and others do not. This,
however, raises the second point that if some interviewers can
produce reliable assessments there is room for improvement and
a need for a clear analysis of what produces such reliability.
Hunt et al. (1944), in a report on the use of the interview for
psychiatric screening in the services, give one clue as to a
possible source of unreliability. When psychiatrists were asked
to place recruits into detailed specific personality categories
they achieved only 32% agreement as to the designation of
particular recruits. When broad categories were used, however,
The Nature of the Interview 5
agreement rose to 54%, and when only two categories — "fit"
or "unfit" for service — were used, agreement was as high as
95%. We can learn one lesson from this and that is that the
unreliability is produced by asking the interview to do too
much — to discriminate more finely than it is capable of doing.
To be useful the assessment interview must not only be
reliable but also valid. The interview's validity is a measure of
the extent to which it does measure accurately what it sets out
to measure — in selection work its accuracy in predicting
whether a candidate will succeed in the position or job he is
applying for. The findings regarding validity tend to be as
confusing as those regarding reliability. North American psycho-
logists long ago grew sceptical of the interview as a selection
device. Kelly and Fiske (1951), as representative American
researchers of some standing, quote higher validities for
objective tests alone than for a combination of tests plus
interview. On the other hand, Vernon (1950), working in the
United Kingdom, referring to the new Civil Service Selection
Boards, reports that no test has anywhere near as high a validity
as the interview. If one looks more closely at the various
investigations of interview validity; what emerges is that results
differ according to the situation in which the interview is used.
In predicting aptitude for tradesmen jobs in the British Army,
tests were found to be of higher value alone than when
interviews were added to the selection (Vernon and Parry,
1949). At the executive level of the Civil Service Selection
Boards, as we have already seen, the reverse was true. What
emerges is that there appear to be some situations where the
interview is not a relevant assessment tool, and in these
situations any predictions made from interviews are likely to be
of low validity.
More sophisticated modern interviewing techniques appear to
improve the picture as one recent comprehensive study of
interviewing demonstrates. Grant and Bray (1969) report
findings from a major practical assessment interviewing pro-
gramme involving 348 men involved in the Bell System
Management Progress Study. "The findings of this study