Interview Sequences and the Formation of Subjective Assessments

Jonas Radbruch () and Amelie Schiprowski
Additional contact information
Jonas Radbruch: HU Berlin, Spandauer Straße 1, 10178 Berlin, Germany

No 45, ECONtribute Discussion Papers Series from University of Bonn and University of Cologne, Germany

Abstract: Interviewing is a decisive stage of most processes that match candidates to firms and or-ganizations. 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 as-signed 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 associa-tive recall. We assess potential changes in the design of interview processes to mitigate contrasting against the previous candidate.

JEL-codes: D91 J20 M51 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 89 pages
Date: 2020-12
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econtribute.de/RePEc/ajk/ajkdps/ECONtribute_045_2020.pdf Fourth version, 2024 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Interview Sequences and the Formation of Subjective Assessments (2024)
Working Paper: Interview Sequences and the Formation of Subjective Assessments (2024)
Working Paper: Interview Sequences and the Formation of Subjective Assessments (2021)
Working Paper: Interview Sequences and the Formation of Subjective Assessments (2021)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ajk:ajkdps:045

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in ECONtribute Discussion Papers Series from University of Bonn and University of Cologne, Germany Niebuhrstrasse 5, 53113 Bonn, Germany.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ECONtribute Office ().