Her suit is Prada. Her hair is neatly coiffed. Her handshake is firm and her eye contact steady. Her body leans forward ever so slightly to show that she is interested, but not anxious. Her easy banter manages to convey her many achievements without seeming arrogant. Her replies arise after thoughtful pauses. Her compliments seem sincere.
And her next job is quite likely to be the one you are offering, suggests a new meta-analysis of several dozen studies. Combined, the studies show that hiring managers are remarkably susceptible to a job candidate’s appearance, gestures, postures, flattery, and self-promotion. Alas, the study also finds that these interviewer-wooing tactics have more to do with whether a candidate gets the job than how well she performs at it.
“Many executives and managers have too much confidence in their ability to read people,” says Murray Barrick, chair of the management department at Texas A&M University and the study’s lead author. “They don’t want to hear that self-presentation tactics are having this much impact on their hiring decisions.”
“I also didn’t think that our effects would be this strong,” he adds.
Barrick and colleagues’ study offers an antidote to the beguiling wiles of potential hires: Give them all the same structured interview. “Every question you ask should be job related, and you shouldn’t ask more than 12 questions,” Barrick recommends. He also suggests that employers develop a key of great, good, and poor answers that they use to score each interview. At the end of the job search, the employer should consider only the highest scoring interviewees for the job.
Just because self-presentation tactics have undue influence on hiring decisions does not mean that they are not relevant to the hiring process, Barrick warns: “How someone manages other people’s impressions of them often matters on the job.” So rather than treating self-presentation tactics merely as a source of bias and bad decision making, employers should explicitly rate them. “Put a number to that gut reaction,” he says. “You’re going to have it anyway.” By consciously accounting for interviewees’ self-presentation tactics, employers may then decide how much to allow these subtle dynamics to shape their decisions.
Murray R. Barrick, Jonathan A. Shaffer, and Sandra W. DeGrassi, “What You See May Not Be What You Get: Relationships Among Self-Presentation Tactics and Ratings of Interview and Job Performance,” Journal of Applied Psychology, 94, 2009.
Read more stories by Alana Conner.