The Impossible Question : Part 4

How Would You Move Mount Fuji?: Microsoft's Cult of the Puzzle - How the World's Smartest Companies Select the Most Creative Thinkers
by William Poundstone

(Page 4 of 6)

Blank Slate

Microsoft is a fraught place. It represents the best and worst of how corporate America lives today. The software company that Bill Gates and Paul Allen founded was one of the great success stories of the last quarter of the twentieth century. The Justice Department's 1998 antitrust suit against Microsoft has not entirely dimmed that reputation. Maybe the opposite: Microsoft is now bad, and as we all know, bad is sometimes good. People have misgivings about Microsoft, just like they do about pit bulls and the Israeli Army. People also figure that if Microsoft hires this way, well, it may push the ethical envelope, but it must work.

Microsoft's role in changing interview practice is that of a catalyst. This influence owes to a shift in hiring priorities across industries. With bad hires more costly than ever, employers have given the job interview an importance it was never meant to have.

There was a time when a corporate job interview was a conversation. The applicant discussed past achievements and future goals. The interviewer discussed how those goals might or might not fit in with the company's. If the applicant was "put on the spot," it was with one of the old reliable human resources chestnuts such as "describe your worst fault." At many companies, that type of low-pressure interview is on its way out. The reasons are many. References, once the bedrock of sound hiring practice, are nearing extinction in our litigious society. The prospect of a million-dollar lawsuit filed by an employee given a "bad reference" weighs heavily on employers. This is often dated to 1984, when a Texas court ruled that an insurance salesman had been defamed when his employer, insurance firm Frank B. Hall and Company, was asked for a reference and candidly rated the salesman "a zero." The court added a few zeros of its own to the damage award ($1.9 million).

Employment attorneys observe that awards of that size are rarer than the near hysteria prevailing in human resources departments might suggest. They also allow that - theoretically - the law protects truthful references. It is tough to argue against caution, though. "We tell our clients not to get involved in references of any kind," said Vincent J. Appraises, former chair of the American Bar Association's Labor and Employment Law Section. "Just confirm or deny whether the person has been employed for a particular period of time and that's it. End of discussion."

Equally problematic for today's hirers is the generically positive reference letter. Some companies are so terrified of lawsuits that they hand them out indiscriminately to any employee who asks. It's no skin off their nose if someone else hires away an inept employee.

With references less common and less useful, hirers must seek information elsewhere. The job interview is the most direct means of assessing a candidate. But the ground rules for interviews have changed in the past decades. It is illegal in the United States for an interviewer to ask an applicant's age, weight, religion, political view, ethnicity, marital status, sexual preference, or financial status. Nor can an interviewer legally inquire whether a job seeker has children, drinks, votes, does charity work, or (save in bona fide security-sensitive jobs) has committed a major crime. This rules out many of the questions that used to be asked routinely ("How would your family feel about moving up here to Seattle?") and also a good deal of break-the-ice small talk. Hiring has always been about establishing a comfort level. The employer wants to feel reasonably certain that the applicant will succeed as an employee. That usually means sizing up a person from a variety of perspectives. In many ways, today's job candidate is a blank slate. He or she is a new person, stripped of the past, free of social context, existing only in the present moment. That leaves many employers scared.

One popular website for M.B.A. recruiting offers a "Social Security Number Decoder for Recruiters." Based on the first three digits, it tells where a job candidate was living when the social security number was issued. "The point being..." you ask? Well, it's one way of telling whether someone is lying about his past - a way of spotting contradictions when employers can't pose direct questions.

The Two-Second Interview

There are other, more serious reasons to worry about the American way of hiring. In the past decade, the traditional job interview has taken hits from putatively scientific studies. An increasing literature asserts the fallibility of interviewers.

Two Harvard psychologists, Nalini Ambady and Robert Rosenthal, did a particularly devastating experiment. Ambady had originally wanted to study what makes teachers effective. She suspected that nonverbal cues - body language and such - were important. To test this, she used some videotapes that had been made of a group of Harvard teaching fellows. She planned to show silent video clips to a group of people and have them rate the teachers for effectiveness.

Ambady wanted to use one-minute clips of each teacher. Unfortunately, the tapes hadn't been shot with this end in mind. They showed the teachers interacting with students. That was a problem, because having students visible in the clips might unconsciously affect the raters' opinions of the teachers. Ambady went to her adviser and said it wasn't going to work.

Then Ambady looked at the tapes again and decided she could get ten-second clips of teachers in which no students were visible. She did the study with those ten-second clips. Based on just ten seconds, the raters judged the teachers on a fifteen-item list of qualities.

Okay, if you have to judge someone from a ten-second video clip, you can. You probably wouldn't expect such a judgment to be worth anything.

Copyright © 2003 by William Poundstone

About the Author

William Poundstone is the author of nine books, including Carl Sagan: A Life in the Cosmos, Prisoner's Dilemma, Labyrinths of Reason, and the popular Big Secrets series, which inspired two television network specials. He has written for Esquire, Harper's, The Economist, and the New York Times Book Review, and his science writing has been nominated twice for the Pulitzer Prize. He lives in Los Angeles.