The Job Season Without In-Person Interviews
The Job Season Without In-Person Interviews
The Job Season Without In-Person Interviews
By Brian T. Edwards
October 8, 2020
Summary
On the first day of September, I welcomed a new member of my team in the dean’s office via Zoom. I was on the campus, but our new hire — let’s call her C., so as not to put her on the spot — was still more than 1,000 miles away.
C. had asked to start work remotely for three weeks so she could have time to pack up, find a place to live, and move, all of which would take more time than usual given the restrictions of pandemic life. Just that morning, she had closed on a new house. Had she come to New Orleans to look at our housing market? No, she replied, a realtor had showed her houses via FaceTime. “I’m committed!” she said.
The entire job search had been done during the pandemic.
Why so much structure?
Job interviews are one of those tasks in which the two competing aspects of decision making — intuition and judgment — are particularly likely to be thrown out of balance. In his 2011 book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman, an emeritus professor of psychology at Princeton University and winner of the Nobel Prize in economics, argues that there are two aspects to how we make decisions. He calls them “System 1” — driven by intuition, speed, and emotions — and “System 2” —more deliberative and slow, associated with judgment.
As I look back on our experience running this administrative search, virtual interviews democratized our procedures and minimized aspects of hiring built around intuition and discriminatory assumptions about class, gender, disability status, and race — assumptions that I believe fall into the category of System 1 thinking. By focusing attention on the candidate’s talents and experience, virtual interviews can screen out many if not most of what decision makers, despite their best intentions, may be distracted by during initial in-person encounters.
Reference
Edwards, B. (2020, October 08). Advice: The Job Season Without In-Person Interviews. Retrieved October 13, 2020, from https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-job-season-without-in-person-interviews