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Original Article
Applicant Ethnicity Affects Which
Questions Are Asked in a Job
Interview
The Role of Expected Fit
Sima Wolgast, Fredrik Björklund, and Martin Bäckström
Department of Psychology, Lund University, Sweden
Abstract: Three experiments on professional recruiters explored how applicants’ethnicity affects questions prepared for a job interview and
the implications of this. Study 1 revealed that outgroup applicants prompt recruiters to focus more on whether applicants have integrated
cultural norms and values fitting the ingroup norms (person-culture fit), as well as the match between the applicants and their would-be work
team (person-group fit). When applicants were from the ethnic ingroup, recruiters focused more on questions pertaining to the match between
the applicants’abilities and the specific demands of the job (person-job fit). Studies 2 and 3 revealed that questions prepared for outgroup
applicants were rated as less useful for hireability decisions, and that summaries emphasizing person-job fit were perceived as more useful.
Keywords: person-environment fit, ethnicity, recruitment, interview questions, discrimination
Does perception of ethnicity influence which questions are
asked in an employment interview? In the present research
we study whether recruiters’preferences for different types
of interview questions vary as an effect of whether they are
exposed to applicants from an ethnic ingroup or outgroup.
Understanding whether recruitment practitioners formulate
different interview questions faced with applicants of differ-
ent ethnicity, and if so, whether these questions differ with
regard to their usefulness in forming an accurate impres-
sion of the applicant, is key for improving the recruitment
process. Hence, in the current study we do not investigate
the selection of applicants, but rather focus on the preced-
ing phases of the recruitment process where information is
gathered that serves as the basis for the final selection
decision.
Employment Interview
The employment interview is one of the most commonly
used assessment tools in employee selection (Macan,
2009; Macan & Merritt, 2011; Tross & Maurer, 2008).
It is a complex procedure involving an encounter between
employment settings (e.g., organizational demands and
interviewer characteristics and performance) and applicant
characteristics, qualifications, and performance in the inter-
view setting. Even though the employment interview has
been the focus of considerable research, relatively little is
known about how stereotypes and biases influence recrui-
ters when conducting an interview. Instead, research has
tended to focus on properties of interviewer ratings, such
as factors influencing their reliability (Conway, Jako, &
Goodman, 1995) and criterion-related validity (Posthuma,
Morgeson, & Campion, 2002). Whereas some recent
research suggest that there is only a minimal advantage of
conducting structured interviews (Kepes, Banks, McDaniel,
& Whetzel, 2012), for a number of years a majority of
researchers have claimed that interviewer judgments based
on structured interviews are more predictive of future job
performance than those from unstructured interviews
(Conway et al., 1995; Highhouse, 2008; Huffcutt, Van
Iddekinge, & Roth, 2011; Posthuma et al., 2002), but that
recruiters infrequently use them (Klehe, 2004;Simola,
Taggar, & Smith, 2007). Instead recruiters typically conduct
interviews where they have decided on the general topics
beforehand (i.e., moderate level of question standardization;
Lievens & De Paepe, 2004), rather than preparing distinct
questions that are posed to each applicant. This has been
Journal of Personnel Psychology (2018), 17(2), 66–74 Ó2018 Hogrefe Publishing
https://doi.org/10.1027/1866-5888/a000197