Job interview

For most of human history, work was obtained through personal connections, family relationships, guild membership, or direct demonstration of skill. The formalized interview, in which an employer evaluates a candidate through structured conversation, emerged in the early twentieth century alongside the professionalization of hiring. As organizations grew too large for managers to know every potential worker personally, they needed a method for evaluating strangers.

Thomas Edison's 1921 questionnaire, which tested applicants on general knowledge ranging from geography to the composition of leather, represented an early attempt to standardize candidate evaluation. The practice of structured interviewing developed further through the influence of industrial psychology, particularly the work of Hugo Münsterberg, whose 1913 book Psychology and Industrial Efficiency argued for the application of psychological methods to employee selection.

Research in industrial-organizational psychology has consistently found that unstructured interviews, the most common format, are among the weakest predictors of actual job performance. A 1998 meta-analysis by Frank Schmidt and John Hunter found that structured interviews, in which every candidate answers the same questions in the same order, were significantly more predictive than the conversational format most organizations use. Cognitive ability tests and work sample tests outperformed both formats.

The job interview persists because it satisfies a psychological need that no test score can replace: the feeling that you have looked someone in the eye and judged their character. Organizations continue to rely on the format despite the evidence, and candidates continue to prepare for interviews as performances, rehearsing answers, managing impressions, and presenting a version of themselves optimized for a thirty-minute evaluation that will determine the course of their career.