Are Job Interviews Utterly Useless?

Jason Dana, Assistant Professor of Management at Yale, wrote a thought-provoking piece for the New York Times this past week.  The title of his article: "The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews."  Dana argues that people draw conclusions from interviews based on a variety of factors, yet in many cases, these conclusions are unwarranted or flat-out wrong.  In his article, Dana explains the findings from his experimental research. He began by conducting an experiment in which people were asked to predict a student's future GPA.   They had an opportunity to review each student's past GPA as well as the student's course schedule.  The research subjects also had an opportunity to interview these students.  The research subjects also tried to predict future GPA for some students who they did not interview.  Amazingly, they predicted GPAs more accurately in the case of the students who did not participate in interviews.  In a second experiment, they instructed half of the interviewees to answer each question posed by the interviewer honesty.  The other half of interviewees were told to answer the questions randomly.   Dana reports a startling finding: "The students who conducted random interviews rated the degree to which they 'got to know' the interviewee slightly higher on average than those who conducted honest interviews."  What's the lesson here? Dana argues, "The key psychological insight here is that people have no trouble turning any information into a coherent narrative....People can't help seeing signals, even in noise."