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Applicant Ethnicity Affects Which Questions Are Asked in a Job Interview

Journal of Personnel Psychology

March 2018
17(2):66-74

DOI:10.1027/1866-5888/a000197

Authors:

Sima Wolgast

Lund University

Martin Bäckström

Lund University

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.

Relative preference for different fit categories as a function of applicant ethnicity

…

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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

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