People are still bad at gauging their own interview performance
blog.interviewing.io
People are still bad at gauging their own interview performance
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Re: People are still bad at gauging their own interview performance
#2I would draw the opposite conclusion from that data. The mode difference was 0, and 91% of people were within 1 star of the interviewer.
Without knowing what the interviewer's bar is for any particular star level, I don't see how the interviewees could do any better. Rounding to 1-star increments amplifies relatively small changes -- if the interviewer rounds up 3.6 to 4 and you round 3.4 down to 3.
Re: People are still bad at gauging their own interview performance
#3Maybe I'm missing something, but why isn't the implication going the other direction?
In my experience, the problem is that interviewers have no idea how to correctly value a candidate's performance. Maybe the candidates are closer to being well-calibrated, but their self-assessments don't match up with the interviewers' because the interviewers don't know how to gauge what they are looking for?
Making the assumption that an interviewer knows how to measure the response of a candidate, even in cases of extremely quantitative questions with well-defined answers, is highly suspect to me. I think virtually no one knows how to do that effectively.
Re: People are still bad at gauging their own interview performance
#4In related news, "People are still bad at knowing the unknown" and "Everybody thinks they're average; perhaps because their sample size can only be 1."
Re: People are still bad at gauging their own interview performance
#5I would draw the opposite conclusion from that data. The mode difference was 0, and 91% of people were within 1 star of the interviewer. Without knowing what the interviewer's bar is for any particular star level, I don't see how the interviewees could do any better. Rounding to 1-star increments amplifies relatively small changes -- if the interviewer rounds up 3.6 to 4 and you round 3.4 down to 3.
"You probably interviewed as bad as you think you did" is not a catchy clickbait title.
Re: People are still bad at gauging their own interview performance
#6I often wonder how would these people hire soldiers? "So I see you have no previous experience in killing people... We are looking for people that have at least 5 years of experience in killing people."
My point is you need smart enough people for your job and nothing more. You do an IQ test, a personality one and that's all. The rest can be learned.
Re: People are still bad at gauging their own interview performance
#7>some portion of interviewees are losing interest in joining your company just because they didn’t think they did well, despite the fact that they actually did.
This is the key takeaway for me. This is IMO and experience probably based on a "sour grapes" type defense mechanism, where candidates will internally try to talk themselves out of wanting a job that they felt they didn't get. They walk out of the interview feeling they didn't perform, and instead of regretting the lost opportunity they start to focus on even the most minute "negatives" about the job/company.
The more time you give a candidate to stew about those reasons they don't want the job, the more time they'll have to find reasons that may not even exist.
Positive feedback should be given almost instantly. Some companies and candidates are reluctant to give positive feedback quickly because they feel it may hurt their negotiation leverage.
I don't have data on this, but anecdotally (over almost 20 years in recruiting) I've seen this countless times while collecting post-interview feedback from candidates. The ones that feel they did poorly are likely to mention a negative about the interviewer or company, which becomes somewhat awkward when we come back with a job offer.
Re: People are still bad at gauging their own interview performance
#8Maybe I'm missing something, but why isn't the implication going the other direction? In my experience, the problem is that interviewers have no idea how to correctly value a candidate's performance. Maybe the candidates are closer to being well-calibrated, but their self-assessments don't match up with the interviewers' because the interviewers don't know how to gauge what they are looking for? Making the assumption…
:)) Just the other day a manager said "HR is overwhelmed. They have a student that filters the CVs and she is doing all she can." The senior programmer exploded "How is a student any good at filtering programmers, she does not know anything about programming!".
Re: People are still bad at gauging their own interview performance
#9I often wonder how would these people hire soldiers? "So I see you have no previous experience in killing people... We are looking for people that have at least 5 years of experience in killing people." My point is you need smart enough people for your job and nothing more. You do an IQ test, a personality one and that's all. The rest can be learned.
There's a line there somewhere. Hiring someone for knowing Node is pretty silly, but hiring someone who's spent 5 years developing web apps is a useful metric.
Re: People are still bad at gauging their own interview performance
#10> Therefore, every bar above 0 is impostor syndrome country, and every bar below zero belongs to its foulsome, overconfident cousin, the Dunning-Kruger effect.
Dunning-Kruger effect is attributed to "a metacognitive inability of the unskilled to recognize their ineptitude." [1] Seems like a harsh accusation for being off by a single star.
And the author makes a generalization that the imposter effect is "better" than Dunning-Kruger effect. I don't clearly see why this would be the case for the interviewee.