Blackwell Reference Online

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The employment interview is defined as a dialogue initiated by one or more persons to gather and evaluate information on the qualifications of a job applicant ( Dipboye, 1992 ). With the possible exception of reference checks and application blanks, this is the most frequently used technique of personnel selection . Even when other selection procedures are used, information often influences the final decision only after it has been filtered through interviewer judgments. An important basis for distinguishing among types of interviews is the degree to which they are structured. Most interviews tend to be unstructured in that few constraints are placed on how they go about gathering information and evaluating applicants. At the other end of the continuum are the highly structured interviews in which interviewers are required to ask the same questions in the same way of all applicants, with no follow‐up questions or other deviations allowed ( Campion, Pursell, and Brown, 1988 ). An example is the situational interview. The questions are usually focused on specific requirements of the job and the answers of all applicants are quantitatively scored relative to a common set of predetermined standards. The “patterned interview” falls somewhere between these two extremes. One example is the Patterned Behavior Description Interview ( Janz, Hellervik, and Gilmore, 1986 ). Similar to the ... log in or subscribe to read full text