The Story of Job Interviews and Assessments (+ Their Risk of Hiring Bias)
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In this week’s newsletter, I would like to continue my recent journey into the history of recruitment by looking at the origins of job interviews and pre-employment assessments.
While they began separately and for different reasons, these aspects of the recruitment process eventually came to be used together, as they still are today.
But why is this important for diversity recruiting?
Well, as always, I think that looking into the past helps us to identify possible “blind spots” in familiar procedures, which may underlie historical underrepresentation of certain groups or even continue to introduce unnoticed bias in our hiring efforts. I will return to this point later, to offer some practical suggestions on how to apply our insights.
Along with other familiar aspects of work and recruitment, interviews and assessments were first formalized in the early 20th century as corporate employers needed to hire for a growing number of more specialized roles.
In short, we owe job interviews and assessments to early applied psychology, as the pioneers of this new scientific discipline sought to put theory into practice in the workplace. And once again, we will also see the profound and enduring influence of the two world wars.
The Origins and Persistence of the Traditional Job Interview
In 1915, employment interviews first entered the professional literature through Walter Dill Scott, a notable character in the early applied psychology movement. While this was the first formal description of the modern job interview, it seems that employers actually began using them during the rapid industrial expansion of the late 19th century.
Writing in 1937, Eldon Wonderlic (developer of the Wonderlic Personnel Test) explained, “Most interviews today are conducted in exactly the same way as they were 50 years ago,” which he characterized as “disorganized conversations” leading to “a series of impressions based upon impulsive reactions.” This tells us two important things. First, that employers have been using selection interviews since at least the late 19th century (even though they were not introduced to business scholars until some years later); and second, that conversational or unstructured interviews have a long (and controversial) history.
You may be asking, why did I describe the traditional job interview as “controversial”?
In summarizing the history of interviews throughout the 20th century, one group of management scholars from the University of Oklahoma explained, “It is generally agreed that the interview is modest in terms of reliability or validity.” In other words, the traditional interview format does not do a very good job of selecting the best candidates. And because the outcome is often based on personal intuition, hiring decisions become highly prone to bias.
Actually, this was recognized a long time ago. Research on alternative structured interviews began in the 1940s, when World War II made large-scale studies possible with military recruits. While those studies apparently made little initial progress, structured interviews were eventually introduced in the 1960s and 1970s based on the success of similar approaches in performance appraisal. Perhaps building on this, the range of common interview questions that we are all familiar with—such as, “Where do you see yourself in five years?”—had developed by the late 20th century.
Nevertheless, there is a recognized reluctance among recruiters to use formalized assessment methods such as structured interviews. Recent research has confirmed that this is due to the perceived “threat of technological unemployment,” if standardized tools are used to replace human judgment in employee selection. Unsurprisingly, the rise of AI-based methods has also sparked debate over the continuing relevance of job interviews. While those tools are helpful at predicting job performance, they are not without bias because they are built by humans (who are biased). And besides, interviews play other important roles that mean they will remain critical for both employers and applicants.
The Story of Pre-Employment Testing
Large-scale assessment tests began during World War I, when the psychologist Robert Woodworth’s “personal data sheet” was used to screen US Army recruits for risk of shell shock. Shortly after the war ended, Thomas Edison created his infamous written "Edison Test" (containing a large number of questions) to evaluate the many candidates that were applying to his company. While both of these assessment methods were then imitated by other employers, they initially had limited appeal. A Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) study in 1932 revealed that only a small proportion of companies were using such tests.
Around the same time as Woodworth and Edison were developing their assessments, the American psychologist Louis Terman published the basis of the first IQ test in 1916, which was also applied to soldiers during World War I. Following the war, “highly questionable procedures and equally bad data were used to sell mass testing in the public schools,” as one of Terman’s critics has put it.
This IQ testing program was ostensibly intended to guide occupational placement, but as we have seen elsewhere, it had “baked in” bias right from the start. In fact, it has been argued that Terman’s research merely lent apparent “scientific” support to the idea of “a society led by a male cognitive elite.” Despite this, his work was highly influential. The World War I testing program effectively kickstarted the mainstreaming of psychological research, which had become an established scientific discipline in its own right by 1930.
Today’s psychological tests are likely a direct legacy of the early psychologists’ involvement in World War I, as well as pioneering studies on psychometric testing that formally began at the University of Cambridge in 1887.
World War II saw the Army develop new selection tests to aid military placements and assign personnel to the most suitable work. New tests were also developed for corporate employers around this time, which gained particular interest as tools to reduce bias in affirmative action and equal opportunity programs after the passing of the Civil Rights Act.
Personality testing was popularized following publication of the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator in 1962, which built on the work of Carl Jung and is still the world’s most widely used (and researched) personality classification system. Despite its widespread influence, evidence suggests that it fails to predict individual or team effectiveness. Perhaps in response to this, other personality assessment models were subsequently developed; and more recently, there has been a trend toward bespoke personality tests to reflect the requirements of different business types.
Conclusion
Overall, I think it is helpful to understand the roots of job interviews and pre-employment assessments when formulating diversity recruitment strategies.
Standardized tools such as structured interviews can help eliminate unconscious bias by allowing for more systematic assessment of candidates, compared with relying on human intuition. Despite recruiters’ common preference for a strong human element, which is understandable, we should use the tools available to us that can best ensure a fair process.
That having been said, we also need to be careful not to inadvertently use tests with built-in assumptions that undermine our goals. For example, the Myers–Briggs test has been criticized due to its embedded “false and dangerous ideas about race, gender, and class that drive bias and discrimination.”
These potential pitfalls should not prevent us from adopting new selection tools and practices but instead encourage us to better understand how they can support, rather than replace, human judgement in the selection process. As I often recommend, monitor how they perform in practice by regularly appraising your ATS data to ensure they are effective in creating a fairer hiring process. By doing this, you will learn which interview and assessment tools work best to help you increase diversity and retention in your organization.
JOIN US IN THE COMMENTS: How have you been impacted by learning more about this history, and what information was new to you? Does your organization have any notable experiences with adopting new standardized assessment tools, either positive or negative? As always, please share your thoughts below if this article inspired you.