Tunguz: Unstructured job interviews predict employee success only 8% of the time
Tomasz Tunguz · 20VC: Redpoint's Tom Tunguz on Winning with Data: How To Gain A Competitive Advantage & Dominate Markets with Data and 5 Steps To Create A Data Driven Company · Sep 12, 2016 · at 11:28
Tom Tunguz, partner at Redpoint Ventures, shares research from organizational psychologist Adam Grant on structured recruiting methodologies and candidate assessment.
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“Unstructured interviews, which is when we interview people by asking just kind of the typical questions, can only predict success in about eight percent of the cases, which is far worse than a coin flip. And so what Adam Grant, who's a professor in this field, recommends is the first thing you do is you perform a structured interview. Everybody asks the same set of questions. And those questions are based upon the characteristics that are going to find success in this role. So the right way to recruit somebody is first, you define the role, you define what success looks like, and then you create a set of structured questions that the four or five people are going to be interviewing this person, all ask, and all rank on the same scale. And then Professor Grant also recommends doing actually a, basically a standardized test, like an IQ test. If you do those two things, then you go from about eight percent predictive, predictive capability to more than I think it's a 54%, which is a huge increase.”
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