Job Interviews Are Completely Useless

You know them and I know them- the smooth talker who can twist their words into something hypnotic and who pulls the wool over a managers eyes by acting enthusiastic, but their charisma ends with the interview. Once they get hired, the truth starts to unfold and reality sets in- they're genuinely pretty terrible at the job.

As the world around us changes, the job interview process might need to change, too. While it probably won't happen tomorrow, the day might not be too far away when hiring managers focus more on job achievements on paper than they do promises coming from a candidate's mouth.

According to an article in the New York Times, job interviews are pretty much useless and managers have become a little too confident when it comes to accurately judge a person's ability to do the job they're applying for based on face-to-face interviews. Because managers feel so confident about a person based solely on face-to-face interviews, they're missing key pieces of employment history.

Often when a manager is charmed by a candidate in a face-to-face interview, they don't take the necessary time to look at other things such as actual job-related skills and past employment performance and this often leads to hiring someone all wrong for the job.

Moral of the story- if you're a manager and have a face-to-face meeting with a job candidate, don't let that meeting alone be the deciding factor whether or not you hire the person. Make sure that you really dig into their resume and previous employment history.

[via New York Times]