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Interview Sequences and the Formation of Subjective Assessments

Jonas Radbruch and Amelie Schiprowski

No 10957, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: Interviewing is a decisive stage of most processes that match candidates to firms and organizations. This paper studies how and why a candidate’s interview outcome depends on the other candidates interviewed by the same evaluator. We use large-scale data from high-stakes admission and hiring processes, where candidates are quasi-randomly assigned to evaluators and time slots. We find that the individual assessment decreases as the quality of other candidates assigned to the same evaluator increases. The influence of the previous candidate stands out, leading to a negative autocorrelation in evaluators’ votes of up to 40% and distorting final admission and hiring decisions. Our findings are in line with a contrast effect model where evaluators form a benchmark through associative recall. We assess potential changes in the design of interview processes to mitigate contrasting against the previous candidate.

Keywords: interviews; hiring; contrast effect; memory (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D91 J20 M51 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hrm and nep-lma
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Related works:
Working Paper: Interview Sequences and the Formation of Subjective Assessments (2024) Downloads
Working Paper: Interview Sequences and the Formation of Subjective Assessments (2021) Downloads
Working Paper: Interview Sequences and the Formation of Subjective Assessments (2021) Downloads
Working Paper: Interview Sequences and the Formation of Subjective Assessments (2020) Downloads
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