It’s always been an unreliable process, so let’s think again about how to recruit the right people writes Martha Gill in The Guardian
In the evolutionary arms race between interviewer and interviewee, I think it is inevitable that both roles will at some point be played fully by robots. AI is already helping us to filter through CVs – one day, we will be able to leave chatbots entirely to it: everywhere, in pockets of cyberspace, one large language model will be offering another a seat and asking about the last challenge it faced at work, while we humans get on with something more useful.
We came one step closer to this utopia recently, when one – clearly quite brilliant – job candidate was revealed to be using AI to feed her answers during a Zoom interview. A phone app recorded the questions in real time and delivered “perfect” replies, which she calmly read off the screen, thus demonstrating innovation, resourcefulness, and a healthy disrespect for the whole interview process. I hope she gets the job.
This disrespect is, after all, long overdue. It may be time to get rid of the job interview altogether. Since at least the early 1900s, it has squatted in the centre of the hiring process, where it has revealed – primarily – that we like to think ourselves “good at reading people”, when in fact we really aren’t. We know this because the interview has been the subject of a swathe of research. And what has this research told us? In sum, that if one candidate outperforms another in an informal interview, the chances that they will do better in the job are little better than flipping a coin.
How do we get people so wrong? Well, one major problem is bias . How a candidate looks tends to matter more than it should – the beautiful always do better, even when the job involves data input or working for radio. People also tend to give jobs to those most similar to them in terms of background, gender, age and race (there are now attempts to train recruiters out of this, but biases are hard to shift). When recruiters aim to find someone who is a “cultural fit” for their workplace, this is often what they are doing, consciously or not.
People tend to give jobs to those most similar to them in terms of background, gender, age or race
Then, too, minds are often made up during the first few minutes of an interview, in the bit where you chat about the traffic or the weather, supposedly to get the candidate to relax. This suggests superficial qualities weigh heavily in hiring decisions, whether or not recruiters are aware of it. The firmness of a handshake can be used to predict offers, even when grip strength has little to do with the job itself. Apparently, this is in part because first impressions can dictate the direction of the rest of the interview. If recruiters feel apprehensive about a candidate at first glance, they might be inclined to ask them tougher questions, or look for evidence that their impressions are correct.
In his book Noise, psychologist Daniel Kahneman provides a telling example of this sort of bias. Two colleagues interview the same candidate, who explains that he left his last job because of a “strategic disagreement with the CEO”. But the colleagues interpret this differently. One, who starts with a positive view of the interviewee, takes it “as an indication of integrity and courage”. The other, who has formed the opposite impression, believes that instead it shows “inflexibility, perhaps even immaturity”.
This wouldn’t matter, perhaps, if interviews were treated as a relatively small part of the hiring process – the final flourish. But they tend to leave vivid impressions, which can override CVs, references, and even test scores. Yes – performance in one highly artificial situation seems to matter more than actual data.
Despite all this, employers are deeply attached to the process – they remain convinced that they cannot really “get a feel of a candidate” without it. Like driving or sex, we all seem to have a deeply held belief that we are good at interviewing. Structured interviews – where every candidate is asked the same question and evaluated according to an algorithm, rather than according to the guts of their interviewers – are better at predicting job performance but have been fiercely resisted by employers. They prefer to trust their intuition to tell them whether a candidate is right or not. They “just know”.
One answer, then, as to why the interview remains in the hiring process, is that it massages the egos of recruiters. I think that this might also explain another puzzle – a fad for off-the-wall questions that have nothing to do with the job.
Such questions have long infuriated job seekers. When in 1921 the American inventor Thomas Edison interviewed graduates at his plant, the questions included “Who wrote Home Sweet Home?” and “What is the weight of air in a room 20x30x10?”. “ ‘Victims’ of test say only ‘a walking encyclopedia’ could answer questionnaire” ran a headline in the New York Times. But, of course, the trend didn’t end there. “If you could be remembered for one sentence, what would it be?” Google once asked candidates for an associate account strategist position. Goldman Sachs, meanwhile, had this question for prospective bankers: “If you were shrunk to the size of a pencil and put in a blender, how would you get out?”
Of course, one effect of such questions is to make a profession seem far more interesting than it is – thus flattering the interviewers.
But hiring is too important for this sort of nonsense; a nation’s success, after all, rides on the quality of its employees. Getting the right people into the right jobs is where fairness and productivity meet. We should start by making job interviews more structured. We could end by getting rid of them altogether.
Michael Safi in The Guardian
Padanna in Kerala is the home town to at least six young men who are believed to have left to join the Islamic State Photograph: Sasi Kollikal for the Guardian
Residents of Kerala like to call their lush south Indian state, “God’s own country”. Hafizuddin Hakim disagreed.
The 23-year-old left his wife and family in June, telling them he was headed to Sri Lanka to pursue his Islamic studies. Around the same time, 16 others slipped out of his district, Kasargod, and another four from neighbouring Palakkad.
The next anyone heard from the missing 21 was an encrypted audio recording sent from an Afghan number. “We reached our destination,” it said. “There is no point in complaining to police ... We have no plans to return from the abode of Allah.”
The mass disappearance of the group, widely believed – but not confirmed– to have joined Islamic State, is one of a number of incidents this year that have raised fears that India, so far unscathed by the terrorist group, might be seeing increased activity.
India’s Muslim population, the third largest in the world, has so far contributed negligible numbers to Isis – fewer than 90 people, according to most estimates. “More have gone from Britain, even from the Maldives, than India,” says Vikram Sood, a former chief of India’s foreign spy agency.
But growing concern over the group’s influence was made official this month, when the US embassy in Delhi issued its first Isis-related warning, of an “increased threat to places in India frequented by Westerners, such as religious sites, markets and festival venues”.
However, it is not India’s harsh, dry north, nor Kashmir, the site of a burning Islamic insurgency, where Isis has found most appeal. The group’s unlikely recruiting ground is Kerala, one of India’s wealthiest, most diverse and best-educated states.
Minarets and palm trees intersperse the skyline along Kerala’s Malabar coast, a verdant region of paddies and waterways that weave between villages like veins.
Padanna, in the north of the state, is a typical backwater town: orderly, lined with oversized houses, and made rich by remittances from its share of the nearly 2.5m Keralites who work in the Arab gulf.
It is also from where a dozen people, including Hakim, vanished in June. “He was a carefree, easy-going boy,” recalls his uncle, Abdul Rahim. “He used to indulge in all kinds of activities, smoking, drinking. He was not that religious.”
Hakim had worked in the United Arab Emirates in his late teens, returning to Padanna two years ago. A little aimless, he fell in with a new crowd, centred around an employee of the local Peace International School, an education franchise that adheres to a hardline Salafi Muslim ideology (but which has denied any involvement in the group’s disappearance).
The Keralan backwaters are a pretty network of lakes, rivers and canals stretching almost half the length of the state. Photograph: Oyster Opera Resort
“All of a sudden he became a recluse,” Rahim says. He grew a wispy beard, cut the TV cable to his home and one day, stopped driving his car. “He said it was taken on loan, and a loan was anti-Islam.”
Salafism is not new to southern India, but an influx of Saudi Arabian money in the past decades – partly detailed in Saudi diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks – has produced a harder-edged Islam in the region, says Ashraf Kaddakal, a professor at the University of Kerala.
“It is a very narrow, very rigid, very reactionary kind of ideology,” he says. “And it has attracted many youngsters, especially students.
“These youngsters have detached from their [orthodox Sunni] leaders and started following the online Islam, the preaching and sermons of these Saudi and other Salafi scholars,” he says. “They indoctrinated many through these internet preachings.”
Kadakkal himself has tried to counsel dozens of young people, whose parents fear their children’s increasingly rigid faith. “My counselling has been a total failure”, he admits. “They blindly follow their masters. They get their fatwas from the internet.”
Whatever threat Isis poses to India is fundamentally different, and probably less pressing, than that which most occupies the minds of Indian security officials.
“For us the major fear is from groups such as Lashkar-e-Taiba or Jaish-e-Mohammed,” says Sood, the former intelligence chief. “That is where the real, organised, state-sponsored threat lies.”
In contrast, those arrested so far on suspicion of Isis links or sympathies, numbering 68 people, have largely been self-starters, operating in small, unskilled networks.
“And they were almost all well-short of coming close to actually carrying out anything resembling a lethal operation,” says Praveen Swami, an author and journalist who specialises in strategic issues.
Still, the militant group has explicitly tried to ignite fervour among Indians. Its propaganda wing released a video in May featuring interviews with Indian recruits, including members of an existing jihadi group, the Indian Mujahideen, that pledged allegiance to Isis in 2014.
According to a National Intelligence Agency charge-sheet issued against 16 alleged extremists in July, authorities also believe Shafi Armar, a notorious Indian Mujahideen member believed to be in Syria, has been actively trying to groom recruits back home.
As well, Subahani Haja Moideen, one of six members of an alleged extremist cell arrested in northern Kerala in October, is believed to have actually returned from fighting with Isis in Iraq, where he reportedly met with some of the alleged organisers of the Paris terror attacks, according to Indian news agencies.
On the numbers, overall – and like al-Qaida before it – the group has so far failed to make deep roots in India.
Kadakkal suggests India’s idiosyncratic religious culture just doesn’t blend well with Isis’ highly orthodox worldview. “Indian soil is not right for this kind of extremism,” he says.
Sood agrees: “There is a lot of laissez faire in India, much more than in the more ordered societies of the modern world. We let things be, and that’s terrible when it comes to driving, but otherwise ... it has upsides.”
But the fault-line between Hindus and Muslim in India is a deep one, and the symbolic power of a successful attack could far outweigh any toll of casualties.
“I guess that is the real fear,” Swami says. “If even this small Isis thing succeeds in carrying out large acts of violence, the political and knock-on consequences could create serious trouble.”