EDITORIAL: The Misguided Influence of Industrial Psychology

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GARY WILL is a consultant and speaker who works with individuals and organizations to help them attract employers, employees and customers by adopting a marketing attitude.

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Describe for me a time when industrial psychology has helped your organization.

A commentary on the misguided influence of industrial psychology on the employment interview

(This article was written as a letter to Career Monitor columnist Janis Foord Kirk in response to comments by Professor Alan Saks in the May 10, 1997 column.)

I wasn't surprised to see Professor Saks come to the defence of his field. It wasn't the finance MBAs who suggested that an obsession with creating shareholder wealth might not be the best way to manage a business and I don't expect that industrial psychologists will be the ones to lead the charge in exposing the excesses of their profession.

Overgeneralized research results

I found his response to be both true and dead wrong at the same time. To explain, let me offer this analogy:

Imagine that researchers in Mexico have just announced that they have evidence that proves that they're superior to Canada in hockey.
You take a look at their evidence and you find detailed statistical analyses that compare skating speeds and slapshot velocities between the Mexican team and some Canadian teams. The Mexicans consistently come out ahead. (This isn't hard to imagine since the Mexicans selected their own criteria for comparison -- they were able to stack their team with speed skaters and strongmen.)
The other evidence they point to are a series of victories over a team of nine-year-olds from Mississauga. This is the only team they've ever faced in an actual game.
From this they declare that the evidence is clear and decisive -- they're better than Canada in hockey.

If you get sucked in and focus on their numbers, you'll miss most of what's wrong. The problem isn't so much with what's there -- the evidence is internally consistent and the math is correct. In one respect, their report is entirely true. But we shouldn't accept their conclusions too quickly. To find the flaws, you have to take a step back and question what's not there -- the unwritten assumptions, biases, and framework of their research.

This is the problem with much of the research on the employment interview that industrial psychologists like to refer to. Their entire research program is constricted and myopic. They over-generalize their results, they choose criteria that stack the deck in their favour, and when they do take on competitors they hand-pick the easiest ones to beat.

"The unstructured interview"

The easy opponent I'm referring to is "the unstructured interview" a term which is so broad that it is useless except for rhetorical purposes. And yet industrial psychologists use it all the time.

Here's an abridged version of how one prominent industrial psychologist characterizes "the unstructured interview":

Most interviewers go with their gut, using first impressions, intuition and pet theories. A few minutes before your interview is to begin, a typical unstructured interviewer skims through your correspondence, application, and resume. He formulates a loose plan on what to cover in the interview. Perhaps he will scribble some notes or write out a few questions.

This is the opponent that industrial psychologists want to take on, and, unfortunately, these kinds of interviews do exist. If the psychologists just claimed to offer a better alternative to this kind of interview, we'd quickly agree and wish them luck in vanquishing such a lazy and unfair process.

I don't have any doubts that their narrow, regimented procedures would remove many of the most outrageous elements of old-style employment interviews (such as "If you were a tree, what kind of tree would you be?" questions, where if you say "oak" you're passed over and if you say "birch" you're hired).

But, perhaps in their zeal for fairness and justice or maybe for less noble reasons, what industrial psychologists don't question is whether their recommended alternatives just swap one set of harmful biases and assumptions for another -- but now cloaked under the illusive banner of rationality and scientific objectivity. Good statistics hide the frailty of the foundation of their entire program.

What the language hides is that we can reject the lazy excesses of the "unstructured interview" without accepting the alienating and repressive excesses of the psychologists' "structured interview" -- it is not a two-way battle.

Encouraging signs among the indoctrinated

I suspect that it will be the work of those from outside the industrial psychologists' research program that will lead the way to improved employment interviews in the future. The program of the industrial psychologists is getting increasingly out of touch with what employers need to succeed in the current business environment.

Still, there have been some encouraging signs lately that even some indoctrinated insiders are finally recognizing some of the difficulties with their field.

One of the most useful ways to spot research trends in industrial psychology is through the pages of the Annual Review of Psychology. The two most recent reviews (1994 and 1997) of personnel selection have included these developments:

For the first time ever, researchers' understanding of the purpose of an employment interview has been questioned. A professor in Britain has "proposed that the interview's focus should reflect a dynamic interpersonal process rather than the prevalent psychometric perspective." (1997)
A reviewer has conceded that personality characteristics, personal values, and similar key attributes have been "relatively neglected in the current structured interview approaches." (1997)
The value of much of the research on the interview has been openly dismissed: "As has been the case for the past 30 years, a lot of the current research on the interview is of limited usefulness." (1994)
The entire question of "applicant reactions" to the selection process has been addressed for the first time. The attitude among psychologists has been "our methods have proven to be superior, so organizations should use them whether the people being interviewed like them or not." Only now is the reaction of job hunters being recognized as an issue to be investigated instead of dismissed as irrelevant. (1994)
The history of research on personnel selection has been labelled "pre-Copernican" because it has taken as the centre of its universe only one perspective and ignored the needs, goals, and expectations of prospective employees. (1994, repeated in 1997)

These "breakthrough developments" echo what many from outside of the psychologists' research program have been pointing out all along. Unfortunately, I suspect these recent advancements sound too promising when combined like this. And since few people from outside the field have the time or interest to examine the research, for practical purposes it comes down to a matter of faith.

Implications for people looking for work

The good news is that whether you're a believer, disbeliever, or agnostic in the industrial psychologists' "evidence," the way you'll prepare for an interview is the same.

One way or the other, you have to work with the interviewer that's put in front of you. Whether they're asking you which piece of fruit you'll be in their fruit basket or demanding an example of some obscure incident from your past, you'll get nowhere questioning their techniques.

Industrial psychologist Paul Green's book Get Hired!: Winning Strategies for the Interview was published at the same time as my book How to Prepare for an Employment Interview. We have different views on the value of the psychological research, and yet we give essentially the same advice for preparing for interviews -- often in remarkably similar ways. You still have to be able to use whatever questions you're asked to communicate the value you offer to the interviewer and their organization.