Perceptions of Interviewers' Evaluative Criteria for the Initial Job Interview: Implications for Marketing Our Students

Abstract

Two hundred and sixty job interviewers and 110 marketing students rated the importance of 25 positive and 25 negative attributes of the interviewee in the initial job interview. Factor analysis of the interviewers' ratings indicated that they tended to focus on seven factors (evaluative criteria). Students accurately perceived the importance of four of these factors, but significantly misperceived the importance of the other three. No support for a negativity bias was found. Implications for grooming the students were discussed.

Stories of employability: improving interview narratives with image-supported past-behaviour storytelling training

“…Factors such as nonverbal behaviours and interview anxiety impact the interviewees' ability to deliver employability stories orally in the presence of interviewers (Feiler and Powell, 2016). Interviewers' preconceptions, bias and hirability assumptions also have a direct effect on interview performance ratings (Florea et al, 2019;Lammers et al, 1984;Peterson, 1997;Williams, 2008;Silvester and Chapman, 1996). Additionally, interviews are interactive activities where the dynamics between interviewers and interviewees may alter the results (Brosy et al, 2020;Budnick et al, 2015Budnick et al, , 2019.…”

“…Interviewers' preconceptions, bias and hirability assumptions also have a direct effect on interview performance ratings (Florea et al. , 2019; Lammers et al. , 1984; Peterson, 1997; Williams, 2008; Silvester and Chapman, 1996).…”

“…Employability storytelling introduces normative changes through the structure and content of answers (Lindsay and DePape, 2015), which may affect interviewee anxiety and performance (Budnick et al ., 2019; Jeske et al ., 2018; McCarthy and Goffin, 2004) and nonverbal behaviours, such as eye contact (Tessler and Sushelsky, 1978). Although not in the scope of this study, there is potential to observe transformative changes that occur when the interviewee's responses interact with the interviewers' impressions and preconceptions (Florea et al ., 2019; Peterson, 1997), bias (Lammers et al ., 1984; Silvester and Chapman, 1996) and behaviours (Linden et al ., 1993). Over time, interview approaches may evolve and undergo pro forma changes to yield new format, structure, instruction and delivery so that training may be continuously improved.…”

Integrating Communications Skills into the Marketing Curriculum: A Case Study

“…The arithmetic mean was calculated for each item and used as the self-reported importance measure, which was then rank ordered to indicate overall importance. This basic methodology has been extended by performing factor analysis (Lammers et al 1984) to reduce the number of items to fewer dimensions, by using conjoint analysis (Boatwright and Stamps 1988) or regression analysis (Tomkovick, Erffmeyer, and Hietpas 1996) to derive the importance ratings, by testing differences between means with ANOVA (Leach and Sandall 1995), and by indirectly soliciting evaluations of skills with Policy Capturing techniques (Tomkovick, Erffmeyer, and Hietpas 1996).…”