Management Decision Making
Management Decision Making
Final Exam: August 2013
1) Research discussed in class shows that interviews are not nearly as predictive (e.g., about future performance at your firm) as most managers believe. Nevertheless, almost all firms spend a great deal of time and money conducting interviews every year.
a. With this result in mind, focus on one or two major biases that may influence the interviewing process in your firm, and propose a revised interviewing process that minimizes and corrects these biases. Note: Of course, discussion of these biases should be informed by ideas from the course.
b. How would you convince others in your organization to use this process, when the validity of the current interview process seems so obvious?
Research studies have consistently shown that “Stereotyping” influences our judgment about people and their capabilities. This is especially true in an interview process where judgments about future performance of a person is formed during a short span of time. We are plagued by “confirmation and hindsight biases” in evaluating prospective candidates during an interview process. We pay particular emphasis on “first impressions” such as communication skills, presentation and posture, thus, disregarding the fact the candidate might be putting its best performance and might not reflect the true ability of the candidate’s future performance at the firm. Thus, there is a tendency for people to only seek out information that conforms to their preconceived notions, and subsequently ignoring information that goes against them. For instance, I work for a full-service investment bank, which has a team of investment banking, sales and IT professionals, where the skills set requirements for each of the respective jobs are relatively different. When we interview candidates for a particular position, we form a stereotype bias relating to their ethnic background, educational institution and prior work experience. We look for
Final Exam: August 2013
1) Research discussed in class shows that interviews are not nearly as predictive (e.g., about future performance at your firm) as most managers believe. Nevertheless, almost all firms spend a great deal of time and money conducting interviews every year.
a. With this result in mind, focus on one or two major biases that may influence the interviewing process in your firm, and propose a revised interviewing process that minimizes and corrects these biases. Note: Of course, discussion of these biases should be informed by ideas from the course.
b. How would you convince others in your organization to use this process, when the validity of the current interview process seems so obvious?
Research studies have consistently shown that “Stereotyping” influences our judgment about people and their capabilities. This is especially true in an interview process where judgments about future performance of a person is formed during a short span of time. We are plagued by “confirmation and hindsight biases” in evaluating prospective candidates during an interview process. We pay particular emphasis on “first impressions” such as communication skills, presentation and posture, thus, disregarding the fact the candidate might be putting its best performance and might not reflect the true ability of the candidate’s future performance at the firm. Thus, there is a tendency for people to only seek out information that conforms to their preconceived notions, and subsequently ignoring information that goes against them. For instance, I work for a full-service investment bank, which has a team of investment banking, sales and IT professionals, where the skills set requirements for each of the respective jobs are relatively different. When we interview candidates for a particular position, we form a stereotype bias relating to their ethnic background, educational institution and prior work experience. We look for